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

•eMAG™ is a new nucleic acid extraction platform based on magnetic silica technology.•Performance of eMAG™ and easyMAG® were compared on various clinical specimens.•Agreement for virus detection ranged from 84.6% to 95.9%.•Correlation for virus quantitation displayed R2 from 0.802 to 0.995.•The two platforms showed comparable performance on the clinical specimens tested.

BackgroundeMAG™ (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.ObjectiveTo compare the performance of eMAG™ and easyMAG® on various clinical specimens.Study designRespiratory (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.ResultsDetection 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 R2 ranging from 0.802 to 0.995. Quantitative results showed average overall differences below 0.10 log10 copies/mL between eMAG™ and easyMAG®.ConclusionsThe 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.