By Kirell Lakhman

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A few years ago Peter Hu, director and assistant professor at MD Anderson's Program in Molecular Genetic Technology, launched an annual Real-Time PCR workshop for cytogeneticists, which he's been conducting at AGT's annual conference for the past three years. Yesterday, during the organization's 2009 show in Jacksonville, Fla., was number four.

Here, in a third-floor conference room overlooking the St. Johns River, 10 cytogeneticists were given instructions from Hu's colleagues, Denise Juroske and Crystal Simien, both senior allied health educators at MD Anderson.

The participants were asked to split into two-person teams, and were handed latex gloves, pipettors, pipet tips, microtubes and racks, TaqMan reagents, and experiment protocols.

After accounting for a stock setback — the centrifuge, correct pipet tips, and biohazard bags were still with FedEx — Juroske, the lead instructor, told the participants to alter the listed pipetting volumes, to shake their microtubes really well, and to discard their trash into the hotel wastepaper baskets. No biohazards were used during the session.

"We're cytogeneticists," Hu said. "We're resilient."

The teams' samples were then loaded into an ABI Step One Plus system, which sat humming on a window sill beside a laptop. The participants then returned to their chairs for a lecture on Real-Time PCR by Dave Chappell, a senior ABI field apps scientist.

In wastepaper baskets along the aisle, rubber gloves lay limp beside discarded microtubes, handouts, and coffee cups.

Hu said he was able to get the workshop off the ground four years ago after persuading an ABI sales rep in Houston to lend him a Step One Plus. The company, a unit of Life Technologies, also provides all of the TaqMan reagents used during the course, which yields .2 CEUs.

Hu told me that cytogeneticists are increasingly becoming interested in Real-Time PCR. "Sometimes lab managers send out their med techs as scouts to the workshop to see if it is feasible" to have their cytotechs get an introduction to RT-PCR, said Hu, who is also AGT's education director.

Interested cytogeneticists will still be required to become CAP accredited and undergo PT testing before they can use the instruments in a CLIA lab, he stressed.

Forty minutes later the Step One Plus, which retails for around $30,000, finished its run and Chappell described the results: "This one is OK;" "Something strange is happening with the standard curve on this one;" "I like this one;" and "Houston, we have a problem."

Today's participants were mostly cytogeneticists from regional hospitals and core labs. Cytotech Gregory Rasiuk, an MLT at North York General Hospital in Toronto, said he "never worked in a molecular lab and [has] never done this before. I wanted to expand my knowledge."

Another participant, an Illumina BeadArray sales rep who would later work the exhibit floor a few rooms away, said he simply "wanted to know more" about Real-Time PCR.

I asked HU if he is considering running similar workshops for other kinds of molecular diagnostic technologies, like sequencing or SNP analysis, and he said it would be too expensive. However, he said he plans to offer an intro course on forensics during next year's AGT conference.