International Standards and Reference Materials for Quantitative Molecular Infectious Disease Testing

Molecular diagnostics: harmonization through reference materials, documentary standards and proficiency testing.

There is a great need for harmonization in nucleic acid testing for infectious disease and clinical genetics. The proliferation of assay methods, the number of targets for molecular diagnostics and the absence of standard reference materials contribute to variability in test results among laboratories. This article provides a comprehensive overview of reference materials, related documentary st...

Reference Sheet for International Measurement Standards

Molecular diagnostics: parallels between infectious disease and emerging oncology testing.

Evolving molecular techniques used in the clinical laboratory are becoming increasingly important across nearly all fields of medicine. An increased understanding of carcinogenesis and the use of targeted cancer therapies has resulted in a demand for new types of molecular oncology test to help in cancer diagnosis and as tools to predict response to targeted therapeutics for cancer patients. Un...

Textile Materials: Reference Standards for Characterization Using Multispectral Analyses

The main objective of the research carried out by the Textile Conservation Sector at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, Italy, was to verify the actual potential of optical investigation as means for identifying dyes on ancient textiles, and thus, to avoid taking micro-samples. For this we used samples of new fabrics dyed following procedures described in a number of fifteenth-century ...

Quantitative NMR for Content Assignment of Phytochemical Reference Standards

Reference Standards For reference standards used as primary standards for pharmaceutical quality control, stability testing and inprocess control of herbal medicinal products and respective starting materials a dossier together with a certificate of analysis must be available. In this dossier information on identity testing (e.g. by NMR, MS, IR, UV), purity testing (e.g. water content, residual...