Evaluation of the QIAsymphony SP Workstation for Magnetic Particle–Based Nucleic Acid Purification From Different Sample Types for Demanding Downstream Applications

We evaluated automated nucleic acid (NA) extraction from a variety of different biological specimens using the QIAsymphony SP instrument. QIAsymphony DNA kits were used for DNA purification from human blood and from diverse human and animal tissue specimens. RNA was isolated from human blood stabilized in PAXgene Blood RNA tubes with the QIAsymphony PAXgene Blood RNA kit, and from human colon and bladder carcinoma biopsies using the QIAsymphony RNA kit. Photometric measurement, gel electrophoresis, and LabChip analysis on an Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer (Agilent, Palo Alto, California) showed that the purified NAs were highly pure and intact, and that excellent yields were obtained. The DNA purified from blood and tissues performed well in single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array analysis, shown by call rates for the Affymetrix Genome-Wide Human 6.0 SNP arrays of >99%. No significant differences were observed when array results of DNA purified either with magnetic particle technology or silica membrane technology were compared. The quality of the DNA allowed accurate allelic discrimination by TaqMan SNP PCR. Gene expression analyses of purified RNA either by “Human Endogenous Control Panel” TaqMan low-density array or on Affymetrix HG U133 plus 2.0 GeneChips revealed high concordance between manually purified samples and those extracted on the QIAsymphony SP.