Matched normal control samples are usually included in the study design to accurately distinguish true positive somatic variants from false-positive variants.
Mission Bio does not require (matched-normal) control samples to be processed alongside a patient sample on the Tapestri Platform for the following reasons:
- Mission Bio’s biochemistry (primer-based targeted amplification) increases the overall signal-to-noise ratio resulting in high % complete data (70 % or more).
- Panel performance, for both catalog and custom panels, is optimized in-house and is always at 85 % or more, yielding high-quality genotype data.
- The Tapestri Pipeline used for sequencing data processing implements GATK/HaplotypeCaller, which does not support parallel processing of patient/matched-normal samples.
- Tapestri Insights, which is used for secondary downstream analysis, incorporates a number of quality filters that distinguish false-positive variants from true-positive variants.