Vial-to-vial variation of a stabilized liquid quality control serum

The vial-to-vial variation of a new ethylene glycol stabilized liquid quality control serum (DecisionTM, Beckman Instruments, Inc.) was evaluated. Intervial variation was compared with intravial variation by analyzing multiple vials in duplicate for 22 different analytes at three different concentration levels. The data were examined the Anova statistics partitioning the total variance into the variance within bottle, and the variance between bottle. The F-statistic at P = 0.05 was used to assess the significance of the results. It was concluded that there is bottle to bottle homogeneity for the analytes studied. Other advantages of this liquid material are potential decreased wastage of material due to aliquoting only the required amount of serum, and increased savings in labor time due to elimination of reconstitution that is needed for lyophilized material.