ICBR Seminar: Bio-Rad Droplet Digital PCT Demo

Title 3rd Generation PCR: A High-Throughput Droplet Digital PCR System for Copy Number Variation Determination, Detection of Rare Sequences, Gene Expression and miRNA Analysis, and Next-Gen Sequencing Libraries Quantification

Presented by Yihua Che, Ph.D. Field Applications Scientist Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc.

Lunch will be served, please RSVP to Fred Souret 510-717-2476 or Al Guarino 904-657-3542

Digital PCR enables the absolute quantification of nucleic acids in a sample. The lack of scalable and practical technologies for digital PCR implementation has hampered the widespread adoption of this inherently powerful technique. This talk will provide a technical overview of a commercially available droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) system that enables processing of 2 million PCR reactions using conventional TaqMan assays with a 96-well plate workflow. Data from key applications will be presented to demonstrate that the massive partitioning afforded by our ddPCR system provide orders of magnitude more precision and sensitivity than real-time PCR. First, we show the accurate measurement of germline copy number variation. Second, for rare alleles, we show sensitive detection of mutant DNA in a 100,00-fold excess of wildtype background. Third, we demonstrate the power of absolute quantification for applications including sequencing library quantitation and measuring miRNAs in plasma. We anticipate this ddPCR system will allow researchers to explore complex genetic landscapes, discover and validate new disease associations, and define a new era of molecular diagnostics.

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