Direct purchase of Chromium X

The University of Turku intends to purchase a Chromium X system to expand a previous installation.

According to the Act on Public Procurement and Concession Contracts (1397/2016) section 40 when only a certain supplier can implement the procurement for a technical reason, provided also that there are no reasonable alternatives or substitute solutions, and that the absence of competition is not due to an artificial narrowing of the terms and conditions of the procurement, the contract may be awarded only to a particular supplier, Contracting authorities may award public contracts by a direct award. Prior to making decision the Contracting authority has inspected the relevant markets and available products and after careful consideration found its' conclusion grounded. According to the Act on Public Procurement and Concession Contracts (1397/2016) section 41 A contracting entity may make a direct procurement when a procurement of goods to be made from an original supplier is an additional order that has been placed in order to partially replace or expand a previous delivery or installation. It shall be a condition that a change of supplier would result in procuring goods with different technical characteristics, causing incompatibility or disproportionately great technical difficulties in operation and maintenance. The duration of such agreements and renewable agreements may only exceed three years in exceptional circumstances. The selected product has a unique set of features that enables efficient and comprehensive high throughput transcriptomic characterization of cell suspensions at single-cell resolution: 1) The system can capture more than 500,000 single cells in a single run, from samples that consist cells of heterogeneous sizes (such as peripheral blood). The system has a cell capture rate of ≥50%. 2) The system is compatible with multiple assays that are fully supported by the manufacturer, including single-cell RNA-sequencing, single-cell ATAC-sequencing, single-cell immune receptor sequencing, and detection of surface proteins and CRISPR guide RNAs. The resulting sequencing libraries are compatible with Illumina sequencing platforms. 3) The system is compatible with multiplexing of several biological samples into one reaction. 4) The system is compatible with the existing infrastructure already in place at the Single-cell omics core facility of Turku Bioscience. The system can be used to process the same legacy kits and reagents from 10x Genomics that are currently in use at the facility. That is the reasoning why there is only one provider in the field in question.