To Nanodrop® or Not to Nanodrop®: Choosing the Most Appropriate Method for Nucleic Acid Quantitation

Accurate and reliable nucleic acid quantitation is a crucial step in DNA and RNA analysis workflows.  Often success or failure in downstream applications simply comes down to whether or not the appropriate amount of input nucleic acid is used.  There are a number of key considerations when quantifying nucleic acids with the goal being to obtain not only an accurate measurement of yield/concentration, but often integrity and purity as well. Not all quantitation methods reveal the same information about a sample, so understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each method allows a researcher to choose an appropriate method(s) based on the starting sample type and downstream assay. This webinar will review a variety of quantitation methods including absorbance, fluorescent nucleic acid-binding dyes and qPCR.  The advantages and disadvantages of each method will be discussed including data from samples that were quantitated using multiple methods to highlight the differences in these methods. Knowing how to apply the most informative sample quantitation techniques to different samples is the key to success.