Within the scope of the NGS convention, each year, Sciensano realizes multiple External Quality Assessments (EQAs) in order to assess the accuracy of sequencing of laboratories in Belgium performing variant identification from tumor biopsies (solid or liquid).

Sciensano sends biological samples to laboratories and ensures that the results reported by the laboratories are correct. The various EQAs realized by Sciensano each year are specific to a cancer or sequencing type (solid tumors, hematological tumors and RNA sequencing). For each EQA, Sciensano receives, from each participating laboratory, the FASTQ files and the BAM files of the different samples to analyze, and a BED file of the regions targeted by each laboratory for sequencing.

A bioinformatics pipeline extract QC metrics from the FASTQ files sent by the laboratories and add them to a database. This web application allows users to generate graphs of various quality metrics and define specific analyses to perform.

Got any feedback, question or bug to report ? Contact us at QL_eqone@sciensano.be.

Version of the application: v0.1

Last database update: July 17th 2023

EQAs currently available in the database: