I'd advise against this unless you really know what you're doing. Equipment is just one thing. You need a very well controlled environment that absolutely prevents cross-contamination and environmental contamination. My lab is a very clean molecular biology lab and it isn't good enough for that.

You need processes in place that ensure that these types of contamination are prevented, and constantly checked for. You need a very robust pipeline from sample collection to result dissemination that ensure no mix ups.

All these things are possible, but PCR is ultrasensitive and processes are hard; you could have a huge amount of false results if not very very careful.

It really isn’t that difficult to avoid cross-contamination. As someone who has done literally 10s of thousand of PCR reactions (probably 100s of thousands) you just need to do your extraction and set-up seperate from where you run the reactions.

The real problem seems to be the kit-cowboys who have no idea how to do anything unless it comes out of a kit.

I'm not sure what sort of answer is possible/in good faith/responsible, but this information immediately prompts some probably-predictable questions:

- What bits of equipment would I need? (Generally speaking, not specific to what's in this auction lot)

- What reagents are needed? Where can I get them (both as a general rule, and also specifically given likely huge shortages)?

- How do I actually test for this?

- What do I watch out for to try and mitigate false positives and negatives?

I ask as someone

- completely naive - in the sense of "oh this sounds interesting and easy to do!" :)

- objectively absolutely underqualified to even think about doing this

- incapable of affording any of the equipment

so by all means feed me answers describing how impossibly hard and stupid this is to do, and pretend I'm not serious.

Also, as an aside, it'll be fun to watch the bid price on this. I wonder how statistically above average it'll be. Heh.

I can't answer any of your questions except the last observation, there will be an uptick in the sale prices for sure.

i'm interested. nrp can i reach out to you via email? what is your email?

To be clear, I'm not affiliated in any way with them. I just like to keep track of asset disposition auctions to pick up equipment.

How do you keep track? Are there a standard list of sites you monitor?

Curious what your thoughts are on the value - what markdown from market price can one typically expect?