Laboratory temperature variation is a previously unrecognized source of genotyping error during capillary electrophoresis

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Abstract
Capillary electrophoresis is being used increasingly for microsatellite genotyping. Here, we report that laboratory temperature greatly affects the estimated allele size, with 5 °C changing the estimated allele size by up to 0.7 bp. With accurate room temperature control, this variation would be relatively unimportant but unfortunately, a questionnaire shows that daily and seasonal laboratory temperature differences are often substantial. One solution is to use a set of reference genotypes, which also greatly assists comparisons between different platforms.