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At the end of last year, The Scientist editors spotted a warning notice on the Quanta Biosciences Web site that their supply relationship with Bio-Rad had been terminated. In particular, certain PCR reagents that Quanta had been manufacturing for Bio-Rad were no longer the same and Bio-Rad was now making its own formulations.

The key question is: Are the reagents any different? If so, how? The answer, so far, has proved elusive.

I heard from several researchers, and Bio-Rad clients, that they had never been informed about the switch in reagent formulations until a sales rep from Quanta's new distributor had come to their lab and informed them.

"I was shocked that [Bio-Rad] changed the formulations and never said anything," says Sherri Wood, an immunology lab manager at the University of Michigan, who learned of the switch in the fall of last year when a sales representative from VWR -- Quanta's new product distributor -- came by the lab. She hasn't noticed a change in any experimental results, but says it would be difficult to tell since they had redesigned their experiments recently, and many experimental factors have changed. But the new reagents could have potentially had an effect, she adds. (The price also dropped, from about $700 dollars in May, 2007, to about $500 in November.)

Hardly a day goes by that William Geist, vice president of sales and marketing at Quanta Biosciences, says he doesn't get an email from a former client inquiring whether a change has been made to a reagent or requesting a sample. Since VWR began visiting laboratories and telling researchers of the switch, Geist has received dozens of sample request forms. But most clients still don't know about the switch, he says.

I emailed Bio-Rad representative Ron Hutton to ask how the reagents had changed, and received an official statement that said: "We have made no changes in the performance and quality specifications of our PCR reagents." Hutton declined to tell me how many clients Bio-Rad supplies reagents to, or speculate on how many experiments may have been affected after the change was made. The company also refused to say which, if any, steps it took to inform clients of the change in reagents. Bio-Rad is one of the top five suppliers of PCR reagents.

For four years, Quanta Biosciences produced the reagents for Bio-Rad, which sold the reagents and labeled them as "Bio-Rad iScript cDNA synthesis kit," or "iQ SYBR green supermix" for example. At the end of 2006, however, Bio-Rad ended the relationship with Quanta, and began making their own reagents. Quanta sent out Emails to some of Bio-Rad's biggest clients, and in some cases followed up with a phone call. But the labeling on the Bio-Rad containers remained the same, and the item ordering number stayed the same, says Geist.

Randy Davis, manager of the lab facility that provides real time PCR to 100 investigators at the University of California, San Francisco, Cancer Center, says that a change in an enzyme could have a big impact on experiments. When he heard from colleagues that the reagents had been switched he started running tests to see how the two products compared. So far he has only tested the new Quanta reagents (he is not funded by either company.) "If I was Bio-Rad I might tell people my [reagent] had changed," he says. "I might do it in a way saying 'I like my new enzyme better, I'm dropping the old enzyme,' and provide some data."

Quanta's Geist, for one, is saying that the reagents are different. The company is in the process of analyzing data from comparison tests of the new Bio-Rad and Quanta reagents, run by an independent company. Geist said in an Email that preliminary data show differences, but he declined to send me the data.

Geist says he knows that some labs have left Bio-Rad and are now getting their reagents from Quanta, including the New York Department of Health. I called Katherine Zdeb, director in the office of education and outreach at the Wadsworth Center (one of research centers at the New York Department of Health), and she told me that they don't want their scientists to comment on products.

I asked Geist for more examples of labs that had switched to Quanta because Bio-Rad's reagents do not work as well. He forwarded me an email that a research group in Northwestern had sent him last November, whose contact information he had blocked out, asking for a test sample of the Quanta reagents because they had noticed changes in their results. But Geist declined to provide a contact at the Northwestern group, and he said the researchers told him they did not want to comment.

Hutton said that the decision to end the relationship with Quanta was part of Bio-Rad's plan to "consolidate and internalize our supplier relationships" on various products, reagents being one such product line. In its official statement, Bio-Rad said: "Our company interacts with thousands of suppliers on an annual basis. We constantly re-evaluate sources."

So it remains unclear how the reagent formulations have changed, and whether the changes could affect users' experiments. Heard anything? Tell us -- anonymously, if you'd prefer -- by posting a comment to this blog, or sending an email to: mail@the-scientist.com.