Establishing a quality assurance plan for nucleic acid-based diagnostic laboratories: from planning to implementation

Nucleic acid-based technologies have opened new perspectives in diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment in clinical medicine. To maintain patient confidence in this rapidly expanding field and to provide the highest standard of analysis, strict laboratory quality assurance procedures must be followed. While impressive break-through are taking place in this field, the need for an appropriate and suitable quality assurance (QA) plan for nucleic acid-based diagnostic laboratories must be a top priority. In this study, we developed a systematic QA plan for this kind of diagnostic laboratories that would enable us to assure the highest quality standards of their services. We focus on those labs that would like to start introducing a quality system for the first time and discuss the most appropriate ways to pave the way to implement a QA plan from the beginning. This QA plan is suitable for any nucleic acid-based techniques laboratory regardless of the field or services provided.     

Exploiting a combined computational/experimental sorbent-injection vortex-assisted dispersive microsolid-phase extraction for chromatographic determination of priority phenolic pollutants in water samples

An amine-functionalized metal–organic framework based on aluminum (NH₂-MIL-53(Al)) was synthesized and employed as a sorbent for the extraction of phenolic pollutants. A new designed sorbent-injection vortex-assisted dispersive microsolid-phase extraction was proposed in which the sorbent suspension was simply injected into the sample solution. Herein the experimental parameters that affected the extraction efficiency for the target analytes were optimized, including volume of sorbent suspension, vortex agitation time, eluent type and its volume, and sample volume. Good linearity was obtained in the concentration range of 0.1–10.0 mg L^?1 with the correlation coefficients in the range of 0.9970–0.9981. The LODs and LOQs were in the ranges of 0.030–0.055 and 0.090–0.150 mg L^?1, respectively. The results of the intra- and inter-day experiments showed good precision of peak area with the relative standard deviation (RSD) values of better than 5.82 and 7.85%, respectively. The developed method has been successfully applied to determine phenolic residues in water samples. The satisfactory recoveries were obtained in the range of 83.0–122.4% with the RSDs of less than 12.9%. In addition, molecular docking was performed to predict the adsorption ability of NH₂-MIL-53(Al) sorbent toward the target analytes. The computational results were in good agreement with data obtained experimentally.