Introduction & Quality Control

[QC GUY]

Hi Everyone.

I am a Quality Assurance/Quality Control manager at a government environmental research lab. A chemist by training, quality control has usually been made up of a suite of standard reference materials, replicates, blanks, etc. with acceptability criteria.

Quality control for DNA sequencing and bioinformatics remains a mystery to me. I have not been able to find any explicit discussion of quality control for these activities (on the web). I have been surprised to find that some labs use instrumentation to demonstrate quality control without discussing the quality control necessary for that instrumentation.

This is totally a new area for me, but one that is growing in use in environmental research. My reason for joining this forum is to find out the appropriate quality control for conducting DNA sequencing and source identification (bioinformatics?).

I look forward to future information exchanges on this topic either via forum or via email (hopefully I've set my profile to allow my email address to be accessed).

QC Guy

[GenoMax]

Some of these standards are still being developed. I assume you have access to "Nature" journal. See this recent article for some information: http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v3.../nbt.2403.html

Also see the first few presentations here: https://www.google.com/#q=NGS+site%3Afda.gov