TaqMan® Universal PCR Master Mix: Accept no substitutes

Is the EagleTaq Universal Master Mix equivalent?

We are living in a remarkable, connected age – where all the world’s information is just a click away. It is hard to imagine that as few as twenty years ago to look up a publication abstract it meant going to an academic library and pull out the ISI Abstracts reference volume(s). It seems quaint now, as looking up abstracts of journal articles are just a few clicks away. As a matter of fact, you may have a few browser tabs open to an abstract or two right now.

Of course this has extended to making purchasing decisions, whether researching an arcane part for a do-it-yourself repair, looking up the latest models and features of electronic equipment for personal use, or even shopping for real-time master mix reagents for your gene expression or genotyping projects.

There have been claims the EagleTaq Universal Master Mix from Roche has ‘the same performance’ as the TaqMan^TM Universal PCR Master Mix, and that it is the ‘only master mix available formulated with the core polymerase technology’ that we currently produce. Their Q&A interview article (available here) compares a change to the polymerase as ‘switching the engine in your Mercedes for a low-cost alternative auto manufacturer’, and concludes with a discussion of their equivalency testing across a ‘broad range of conditions’.

However looking closer at the data available from their website only shows ΔCt results from one instrument, with no statistical context information (i.e. measurement of standard deviation), across only four genes.

Our own in-house evaluation went much broader than this: we went across three different instruments (two 384-well formats with the ViiA7^TM and 7900HT and a one 96-well format on the 7900 instrument) and 96 different genes representing a full spectrum of variables of amplicon length (long and short) and G/C content (high and low). The data (available here) show ΔCt average differences (including standard deviations) between the two master mixes as well as the frequency where the ΔCt > 0.5 across these two conditions of amplicon length and G/C content. The data indicate a large difference in both directions across all these conditions. This is clearly not ‘the same performance’.

Lastly if you are in the U.S. or Canada we have a promotion for both TaqMan^TM and SYBR Master Mixes*

All this useful data to help in your buying decision, only a click away. And you don’t even need to get up out of your chair.

 

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