There’s nothing the Quantabio team loves more than to see our products making a positive impact for our customers. We recently had the opportunity to chat with Tim de Meijer, a phytopathological analyst in the diagnostic laboratory at Florensis, to learn about how he’s using the eQo 1-Step ToughMix® Kit for plant pathogen testing.
Founded more than 80 years ago, the family horticulture business is based in The Netherlands, with greenhouses, breeding facilities, and other locations in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Kenya and Ethiopia. Through its own channels and partnerships with other companies, Florensis is an international powerhouse in plant breeding. Its team of 2,500 employees is responsible for supplying some 4,000 varieties of plants to growers around the world. To ensure robust health in their plants, Florensis scientists perform a great deal of laboratory testing.
Recently, they evaluated the eQo 1-Step ToughMix Kit to make progress on two corporate goals: bringing more testing in-house to generate results more quickly and significantly lower costs, and increasing sustainability across the company. Unlike typical liquid master mixes, the eQo kit is lyophilized, delivered to customers as dried-down beads that can be reconstituted with a simple rehydration buffer when needed. This dry format gives scientists greater latitude for storage — the dry beads can be kept at room temperature for months without sacrificing performance — and the rehydrated master mix includes a warm-start reverse transcriptase so it can be run on the bench at ambient temperatures, with no ice buckets needed.
At Florensis, the dry bead format solved a logistical challenge: deliveries can sit unattended for a few days before they’re picked up by staff members. A previous master mix product had been delivered on dry ice and then sat out for a couple of days; the reagent was already ruined by the time anybody found it. With the eQo 1-Step ToughMix Kit, that’s not an issue. “If you let it stand at room temperature it really doesn’t matter,” de Meijer says. “You don’t have to worry about it, and that eases your mind.”
The eQo kit is about more than environmentally friendly shipping and stable storage: it was engineered to outperform the top-rated qPCR master mixes on the market. While the Florensis team had been happy with their previous product, de Meijer says that the eQo kit’s performance was impressive. “We gave it a shot and it worked even better than the other kit,” he says. “We had good results right from the start, without any optimization necessary.”
To learn more about how the eQo 1-Step ToughMix Kit was evaluated at Florensis, please read the
full customer profile.
2min
Jun 24, 2025
