Every assay at Transnetyx should be approved by each customer or laboratory sending known control samples. We believe this is the best way to ensure each assay functions correctly for your specific strain and confirms we are giving you accurate results every time. We cannot perform this approval without our customers' participation. To help encourage this assay approval, we provide six free control samples for each unique strain (compilation of probes).

Running controls for your experiment is always a best practice, and we ask that you do so when first sending your genotyping to Transnetyx. All assays that we run on a new strain in your account should be validated. Once your strain has had both positive and negative results reported?, we consider the assay approved. 

There are several quality assurance measures in place that allow us to confidently run approved assays without your needing to submit additional controls on every order. For instance, we run a positive control assay on every sample that confirms that the lysis and DNA extraction process were successful. We QC incoming reagents, and we verify volumetric delivery via fluorescent measurements. We are happy to share with you all the information about our quality systems that contribute to our accuracy rate (99.96%). It is important to note that we calculate our accuracy rate based on approved assays. Therefore, if no controls are ever sent and we never report both positive and negative results, the accuracy rate may be lower.

In the past, we have not limited the number of free controls. Unfortunately, due to the growing misuse of this feature from a small population, we can no longer continue without a hard limit. Should you find yourself in a position where you feel as though more than six samples are needed to validate one of your assays, please let our team know and we are happy to review the situation with you.