Comparison of eMAG™ versus NucliSENS(®) EasyMAG(®) performance on clinical specimens

BACKGROUND: eMAG™ (bioMerieux) is a new nucleic acid extraction platform based on magnetic silica technology, like its predecessor, NucliSENS(®) easyMAG(®) (bioMerieux). Using the same reagents and disposables, eMAG™ adds further automation, allowing simultaneous extraction of 48 samples directly from primary tubes, and distribution of nucleic acid extracts on PCR strips or in tubes at the end of the extraction process. OBJECTIVE: To compare the performance of eMAG™ and easyMAG(®) on various clinical specimens. STUDY DESIGN: Respiratory (n = 199), whole blood (n = 50), plasma (n = 25) and urine (n = 25) specimens were extracted in parallel on both platforms. Both qualitative (respiratory virus, cell control, CMV, EBV, HHV6 and BKV detection) and quantitative (respiratory virus and cell control cycle thresolds, and CMV, EBV, HHV6 and BKV viral loads) results were compared. RESULTS: Detection of qualitative targets showed good agreement, ranging from 84.6% for whole blood to 95.9% for respiratory specimens. Correlations between quantitative results were good, with R(2) ranging from 0.802 to 0.995. Quantitative results showed average overall differences below 0.10 log(10) copies/mL between eMAG™ and easyMAG(®). CONCLUSIONS: The two platforms showed comparable performance on the types of clinical specimen tested. With higher automation and throughput than easyMAG(®), the eMAG™ platform is likely to be advantageous for laboratories performing a large number of molecular analyses.