CONTRACTOR QUESTIONS AND GOVERNMENT RESPONSES 7 29 2022 2 22 PM.pdf

CONTRACTOR QUESTIONS AND GOVERNMENT RESPONSES

Question 1: “Is CAP/CLIA required for the requested work?

Government Response: Not required, but should be stated if the contractor’s facility hold the certification.

Question 2: In the solicitation, shipping is specified as either one shipment of all 20 samples or up to 3 potential shipments of 10, 5, and 5 samples. Pricing will be more optimal if all 20 samples are received at once given that sequencing is generally cheaper in bulk. Should a quote be prepared for the more expensive option of two shipping schedules or perhaps two options, for each possible scenario?

Government Response: Quote should at the minimum be prepared for the potential of 3 shipments, but contractor can choose to submit pricing for both options.

Question 3: Regarding language surrounding potential re-sequencing of samples not meeting the requested specifications, can this be elaborated on? It would be ideal to agree on an unacceptable threshold that would necessitate a rerun to avoid future disputes on quality. For example, if you are aiming for ~8 GB total, perhaps some lower minimum estimate could be provided such as, for example, a minimum 20M read pairs per sample after QC (roughly 6GB).

Government Response:

As stated in the solicitation, the acceptable thresholds are (1) 80% of sequencing reads shall have a Q score above 30, and (2) each sample should yield approximately 85 Gigabases of raw throughput. If calculated, that would be approximately 68 Gigabases of raw throughput with a Q score above 30. Both thresholds must be met for the data to be considered acceptable.”