Dear Scott Ferson, Thanks for the nice reply. My question was related to nucleic acid tests used for the screening of viral agents in blood establishments/blood banks.

Are asking about the uncertainty associated with, for instance, genetic sequencing? If so, then the just-published paper by O'Rawe et al. in Trends in Genetics entitled "Accounting for uncertainty in DNA sequencing data" will be of interest. (http://www.cell.com/trends/genetics/abstract/S0168-9525%2814%2900209-1, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tig.2014.12.002). It describes complementary models of probability intervals and confidence structures for characterizing the uncertainties that arise in the sequencing process. The paper discusses the types and sources of uncertainty and error in DNA sequencing data, and describes the state of uncertainty quantification in DNA sequencing analysis. It argues that specifying/propagating epistemic and aleatory uncertainties can be done with existing computational tools, and that DNA sequencing analyses will benefit from robust and honest uncertainty quantifications. Here is the abstract:

Science is defined in part by an honest exposition of the uncertainties that arise in measurements and propagate through calculations and inferences, so that the reliabilities of its conclusions are made apparent. The recent rapid development of high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies has dramatically increased the number of measurements made at the biochemical and molecular level. These data come from many different DNA-sequencing technologies, each with their own platform-specific errors and biases, which vary widely. Several statistical studies have tried to measure error rates for basic determinations, but there are no general schemes to project these uncertainties so as to assess the surety of the conclusions drawn about genetic, epigenetic, and more general biological questions. We review here the state of uncertainty quantification in DNA sequencing applications, describe sources of error, and propose methods that can be used for accounting and propagating these errors and their uncertainties through subsequent calculations.

Dear Scott Ferson, Thanks for the nice reply. My question was related to nucleic acid tests used for the screening of viral agents in blood establishments/blood banks.

Dear Paulo yourquestionisboth relevant and interesting

 cheers

 Jerard