There is the saying “quantitative PCR is easy to perform, but hard to do it right”. With high quality instruments, robust reagents and pre-designed (pre-validated) assays, even novice users can easily generate qPCR data. The challenge is in ensuring that the qPCR data accurately reflect the measure you are interested in. Many variables may negatively impact results: use of non-validated reference genes, non-specific assays, trace amounts of genomic DNA that may be co-amplified, non-calibrated pipets or instruments with too large well-to-well variation. In this blog, I will describe a method to assess instrument related measurement error.