Quantitative PCR-Based Method to Assess Cell-Free DNA Quality, Adjust Input Mass, and Improve Next-Generation Sequencing Assay Performance.

Cell-free (cf)DNA-based testing has undergone increasingly wide adoption, including assays for the detection of circulating tumor DNA. Due to nucleosome protection, cfDNA has a distinctive fragment size of 160 to 180 bp. However, cfDNA can be contaminated with high molecular weight genomic DNA from blood cells released in plasma during sample collection.