Bio-Rad Launches PrimePCR™ Assays for Droplet Digital™ PCR

Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. has announced the release of its PrimePCR assays for Droplet Digital PCR systems. This release expands Bio-Rad's current offering by an additional 46 mutation detection assays and 323 copy number assays. In addition, the existing set of gene expression qPCR primer-only assays can now be used with the recently launched QX200™ Droplet Digital PCR system, featuring EvaGreen detection capabilities.

The new ddPCR assays are the only predesigned and fully wet-lab validated assays for digital PCR, alleviating the burden placed on researchers of design and experimental optimization and offering precision and sensitivity without a standard curve. The assays enable novel research strategies and accelerate discovery for inherited disorders, cancer, and infectious diseases.

Many methods for mutation analysis offer poor selectivity and fail to detect mutation events with abundances of less than one in 100 wild-type sequences. Bio-Rad’s ddPCR technology provides an absolute measure of target DNA molecules, and together with the PrimePCR mutation detection assays, can enable the detection of one mutant molecule in the background of 100,000 wild-type sequences (0.001%). Measuring these extremely low levels of mutation abundance can lead to dramatically more sensitive and less invasive diagnostics.

Current methods, including qPCR and next-generation sequencing, also lack the resolution needed to accurately analyze copy number variation (CNV). Due to their high precision and absolute measurement capability, ddPCR assays enable the quantitative discrimination required to resolve small-fold changes in gene copy numbers. ddPCR assays can also be used to detect subsequent changes in the expression of target genes.

PrimePCR ddPCR assays are available in multiple reaction sizes and are compatible with both the QX100 and QX200 platforms using the ddPCR supermix for probes.