Bio-Rad QX 200 Droplet Digital PCR System
IT STARTS WITH A DROPLET AND ENDS IN DISCOVERY.
Bio-Rad's QX200 ddPCR System combines water-oil emulsion droplet technology with microfluidics. The QX200 System consists of two instruments: droplet generator and a droplet reader and associated consumables.
Droplet Digital PCR (ddPCR™) is Bio-Rad’s unique digital PCR technology. With unrivaled precision, Droplet Digital PCR provides absolute quantification of target DNA or RNA molecules without the use of standard curves. It addresses the lack of scalable and practical technologies for digital PCR implementation. The new QX200 Droplet Digital PCR System puts this powerful technology in your hands, ready to unveil new worlds of research at previously unattainable levels.
PCR becomes “digital” through sample partitioning and the subsequent statistical analysis of target detection across the partitions. The QX200 System uses advanced microfluidics technology to achieve partitioning on a massive scale, generating 20,000 highly uniform nanoliter-sized droplets per sample. For even higher sensitivity, it is possible to combine wells and analyze millions of droplets for a single sample.
Simple and reliable, Droplet Digital PCR technology has already led to several research breakthroughs in fields such as cancer biomarker discovery, infectious diseases, genomic alterations, and gene expression. This research is only the beginning. What discoveries will you make using Droplet Digital PCR?
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
WHAT’S IN A DROPLET?
A VERSATILE AND SCALABLE WORKFLOW
Droplet Digital PCR has a simple, user-friendly experiment setup designed to process eight samples at a time. The process easily scales up to run a 96-sample experiment in 5 hours with minimal hands-on time. When higher throughput is required, multiple 96-sample experiments can be run in a day.
Bio-Rad’s QX200 ddPCR System combines water-oil emulsion droplet technology with microfluidics. The QX200 System consists of two instruments — a droplet generator and a droplet reader — and associated consumables. The droplet generator partitions each sample into 20,000 uniform nanoliter-sized droplets in which nucleic acid molecules are distributed in a random fashion. Each droplet serves to partition the reactions. Droplets are transferred to a 96-well PCR plate and PCR is performed to end point in a thermal cycler. The droplets stream single file through the reader for fluorescence analysis. Positive droplets, which contain at least one copy of the target DNA or RNA molecule, exhibit increased fluorescence compared to negative droplets. The fraction of PCR-positive droplets enables the target to be quantified according to the Poisson distribution.
The QX200 System works with both hydrolysis probes and EvaGreen fluorescence detection chemistries, and its flexible design allows for high throughput and ultra-sensitive detection.
KEY BENEFITS
■ Achieve absolute quantification without the use of a standard curve
■ Design scalable assays for high sensitivity or high throughput
■ Expand applications using flexible ddPCR chemistry — EvaGreen or probes
1. Prepare ddPCR reaction mix
■ Combine DNA sample, primers, and/or probes with one of Bio-Rad’s ddPCR Supermixes■ Fully validated PrimePCR ddPCR Assays can be used
2. Generate droplets
■ Load the ddPCR reaction mix into the wells of a droplet generator cartridge
■ 8 x 20,000 droplets are generated from each run in the QX200 Droplet Generator
■ Target DNA ( ) and background DNA ( ) are randomly distributed in droplets
3. Perform PCR with EvaGreen or hydrolysis probes
■ Transfer the droplets to a 96-well PCR plate and seal the plate
■ Run the PCR protocol
4. Read and analyze results
■ After PCR, load the 96-well PCR plate into the QX200 Droplet Reader
■ Positive and negative droplets in each sample are read
■ Analyze concentrations with QuantaSoft™ Software
Specifications
QX200 Droplet Generator Starting sample size 20 µl Capacity 1–8 samples/cartridge Droplets per sample 20,000 Dimensions (W × D × H) 28 × 36 × 13 cm (11 × 14 × 5 in.) QX200 Droplet Reader Precision ±10% Linear dynamic range 5 orders of magnitude Capacity 1–96 samples Droplets per 96-well plate Approximately 1,500,000 Sample illumination Light-emitting diodes Sample detection Multipixel photon counter Detection channels FAM (EvaGreen), HEX (VIC) Dimensions (W × D × H) 66 × 52 × 29 cm (26 × 20 × 11 in.)
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