| Sumario: | Liquid-based cytology (LBC) has been used as a diagnostic tool for cervical cancer for years and is now being
adopted for other gynecological cancers. LBC represents an important challenge to ensure that the process yields
representative biospecimens for quality control (QC) of diagnostic procedures. In this study, we compare QC
parameters (integrity, yield and purity, and polymerase chain reaction [PCR] amplification) of DNA isolated from
LBC (N= 296) using two different nucleic acid isolation methods, manual (n = 233) or automated (n = 63). We also
evaluated two different types of cytological brushes for sampling from the cervix. Our results suggest that manual
isolation (yield 22.81 – 1.92 mg) resulted in increased DNA recovery when compared with automated isolation
(yield 9.96 – 1.11 mg) from LBC samples, with a p-value of <0.0003. We estimated that 98% (53/54) of the samples
preserved the integrity of DNA and were suitable for standard molecular biology analyses. The b-globin gene was
amplified in 100% (296/296) of the DNA samples by endpoint PCR. We found no significant difference between
the performance of the cytological brushes ( p value of <0.6711) in a general overview. However, when looking
at the results from using each brush individually, the manual isolation method was statistically superior to the
automated method. Our work illustrates the impact of good QC of preanalytic conditions, which will be
important for the application of LBC for developing early detection methods for gynecological cancers.
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