Multiplex Reagents - (Dec/04/2005 )

Hello all-


I will be running multiplex reactions for quantitation (region of interest + external control). There are products on the market designed specifically for multiplexing. Does anybody know whether or not these products make enough difference to justify their costs?

High Cost, widely used: TaqMan probes from ABI
Medium cost, not so widely used: LUX primer from Invitrogen or Molecular Beacon from ???

One of the critical factor to the success is the gene characteristics. Some of them are easily while some of them are difficult.

If you are running Multiplex, please use lower concentration for the highly abundence gene and normal concentration for the low abundance gene to get a better result. You might need to spend some time on optimization.

Thanks for your reply. I am thinking mostly of Taq mixes made specifically for multiplex reactions... such as BioRad's iQ multiplex powermix or Stratagene's Brilliant Multipex QPCR mastermix. Are they really worth the extra cost?

Thanks

I think Qiagen has claimed that its master mix works very well for multiplexing. This will also depend on the genes you are working on. You can get good results even in your first run without any optimization with different mastermix.