1087559 Bassil Cranberry Genotyping - Requirements Listing.pdf

Brand Name or Equal

411.170 Brand name or equal.

(a) A "brand name or equal" purchase description shall include the following type of information:

(i) Identification of the item by generic description.

(ii) Make, model number, catalog designation, or other description, and identification of a commercial catalog where it is listed.

(iii) Name of manufacturer, producer, or distributor of the item and complete address.

(iv) All salient characteristics of the "brand name or equal" product or products which have been determined by the requisitioner to be essential to the Government's minimum requirements.

Brand name or equal requested due to below list of functional and performance characteristics that this particular model possesses.

Item:

Requirements:

Reasoning: Rapid Genomics is the sole manufacturer of the Flex-Seq® Ex-L platform, which is based on probe hybridization. The genotyping will be carried out using a proprietary probe set that will be developed and optimized at Rapid Genomics. Rapid Genomics is in sole possession of an extensive library of validated cranberry probes which are not publicly available. They also have significant experience in genotyping genomes and have developed proprietary software algorithms to aid in the development and optimization of probe-based genotyping applications for cranberry. These specializations have been used to successfully genotype hundreds cranberry samples.

Rapid Genomics has already performed an evaluation phase where they designed probes for 60,000 loci, genotyped a test panel of 192 samples, selected 17,502 markers that worked well across all 192 samples and demonstrated their effectiveness in cranberry. We would like to keep this vendor for research continuity purposes.

The other companies have not worked with cranberry. Illumina does not have an evaluation phase and will be prohibitively expensive unless we are able to commit to 50,000 samples over two years, which will not be possible in a horticultural crop like cranberry.