Free Sample Kits to Assess?

[reshmakesh]

Hi SeqAnswers,

We are a new commercial service provider in Northern California and I was hoping to get some insight from some past experiences that some seqanswers members may have had.

We are currently in the process of selecting kits to be used on both Illumina and Ion Torrent instrumentation. We will be focusing mainly on small targets - no WES or WGS. Obviously we want consistency in our kit selection.

Does anyone know if kit providers such as Agilent or Nimblegen provide free kits for validation purposes? Having never been through a kit procurement process before, I'm not quite sure what the industry norm is.

Thank you!
Reshma

[luc]

Nimblegen will provide a test kit.

[InDel]

We usually receive 50% off as a new customer for RNA-Seq. Never received free sample.

[reshmakesh]

Thank you for sharing your experience, Luc and InDel. As of now, we are considering the SureSelect XT, (the Haloplex is certainly attractive but seems a bit expensive) Nimblegen SeqCap, and the Celemics Custom series. We will be testing all 3 kits within the next month or so. I'll share some thoughts on performance once we complete testing.