How it works

You create a SpotCheck gold standard which is a single sample experiment containing gels which represent the quality you wish to maintain in your lab. This gold standard is used as a baseline to objectively measure the quality of your gels.

SpotCheck will consider each spot individually, comparing its value on the test gel with the range of values for that spot on the gold standard gels. It uses standard deviation to measure the spread of values for the spot in the gold standard and calculates where the value for the same spot on the test gel lies within that spread. It uses the log normalised spot volume measurement when performing this calculation.

When you create your gold standard, you specify the criteria that will be used to decide which spots will be passed by SpotCheck. You can adjust these values depending on the stringency of the test you wish to perform.

For example, based on the normal distribution of values, selecting 2 standard deviations of the gold standard would indicate that you’d expect the test value to be within 2 standard deviations of the gold standard mean 95% of the time if the test gel were to pass the quality test.

When you have completed the SpotCheck workflow you are presented with a view of the test gel with the gold standard spot outlines overlaid. The image view is colour coded to indicate which limits each spot fell within and you get a pass or fail verdict for your test gel.

For more information, please visit our FAQ - How does Progenesis SpotCheck work?