Sample Preparation

Reliable sensitive PCR reactions require high quality nucleic acid extracts from the source material. Automated and manual sample preparation processes have been optimised for the use with GFE’s PCR kits for blood screening or confirmation of initially positive screening results.

Sample Preparation Kits

Depending on the application, GFE uses two alternative options for the sample preparation and extraction of pooled or individual blood samples.

automated extraction kit on the autoX-System
manual extraction with a third party extraction kit

Both methods result in nucleic acid extracts that can directly be used in the PCR setup.

autoX Extraction Manual Extraction Sedimentation Aid

autoX Extraction Kit

The autoX Extraction Kit is a ready-to-use reagent set for the extraction of viral nucleic acids. It is based on magnetic bead extraction of nucleic acids.

Process control measures

Special care is taken to control the process integrity. The nucleic acid amplification of each sample, including virus enrichment, nucleic acid extraction and PCR analysis is monitored by an internal control (IC). The performance of our kits is monitored by the PCR positive control for each run.

**autoX Extraction Kit for NA isolation.**
autoX Extraction Kit (Version 1.1) GFE order number Number of reactions per kit	packing unit = 4 kits 011-24-04 24

Intended Use

The autoX Extraction Kit is designed for the extraction of viral nucleic acids of e.g. human immunodeficiency virus type 1 and type 2 (HIV-1 and HIV-2), hepatitis C virus (HCV), hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis A virus (HAV), parvovirus B19 (PB19) and West Nile virus (WNV) from human EDTA plasma from blood donations.

The autoX Extraction Kit is intended for the generic extraction of viral DNA and/ or RNA from human plasma samples from individual donors, pooled human plasma samples from 2 to 96 individual donations (sample pools) or confirmatory samples.

The autoX Extraction Kit is intended for use with GFE’s autoX-System.

Extraction with QIAamp^® MinElute^® Virus Spin Kit

During the manual extraction process the virus nucleic acids are isolated from plasma by chaotropic lysis of the virus particles and binding of the released nucleic acids to a silica membrane. Adsorbed nucleic acids are purified with washing reagents and released by an elution buffer. The eluted nucleic acids are ready for use in the downstream PCR set-up.

For details of the process, product details, and order information please refer to the GFE Confirmatory Kit product information.

For details on the QIAamp^® MinElute^® Virus Spin Kit please refer to the corresponding QIAGEN product information.

The QIAamp^® MinElute^® Virus Spin Kit is a QIAGEN GmbH product and is not available from GFE. It can be purchesed through QIAGEN’s distribution channels.

superX Sedimentation Aid Kit

The superX Sedimentation Aid Kit supports virus enrichment as part of sample preparation by high-speed centrifugation of confirmatory samples.

Intended Use

The superX Sedimentation Aid Kit is an accessory kit for GFE’s nucleic acid amplification process. It is used in sample preparation as part of the overall process for the detection of viruses in human EDTA plasma from blood donations. The kit is used only for processing confirmatory samples in combination with the autoX Extraction Kit.

**superX Sedimentation Aid**
superX Sedimentation Aid Kit (Version 1.0) GFE order number Number of reactions per kit	packing unit = 12 kits 012-16-12 16

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