Proceedings of the national peer review of the Fluidigm® BioMark™ platform: evaluation to assess fitness for purpose in microbial monitoring

The Terms of Reference (TOR) for the science review were developed in response to a request for advice from DFO Science Pacific with the aim to evaluate the analytical performance of the assays developed for the high throughput micro-fluidic platform and inform the decision whether to move to Phase 2b of the study. [...] Discussion Significant discussion ensued regarding the general scientific approach, the sequencing of the stages of the Project, the selection of microbes to be monitored and the details of next steps of the Project. [...] Based on the reported experiments, the authors concluded that in general: • the LOD per chamber was the same for the STA and non-STA samples (4-7 copies) • the LOD per starting sample was approximately 1000x higher for non-STA samples owing to the very small volumes of the chamber; hence the STA enriches the targeted sequences approximately 1000x. [...] Raphael Vanderstichel The presentation explained the overall framework and design of the statistical analyses employed throughout the Project (Figure 2) as well as the statistical methods of evaluating the analytical sensitivity of the assays and the results that were obtained. [...] Discussion As with the previous presentation, discussions were related to cross-contamination, the detection and prevalence of co-infection in the samples, the specificity of gBlocksTM, and the variability of the gene used as internal control for RNA quality (“housekeeping gene”).