Additional file 1 of Application of dried blood spot sample pooling strategies for Plasmodium 18S rRNA biomarker testing to facilitate identification of infected persons in large-scale epidemiological studies

Additional file 1: Text S1. Calculation of total test counts in the GUI for the square matrix pooling scheme. Total test count was the sum of tests for screening pools and individual deconvolution samples. Screening tests for pools was calculated as 2 × N × (number of samples/ N2). If an average of positive sample in each pool was calculated ≤ 1, deconvolution was determined not necessary (shown in Additional file 4: Fig. S3A); if the average of positive samples in each pool was calculated > 1, the Microsoft Excel GUI program assumed that the positive samples were distributed evenly in the matrix, shown in Additional file 4: Fig. S3B. The program counted the total number of pools as QUOTIENT plus one. If the number of positive cases were greater than the total number of pools, the program used function MOD to determine the number of pools having additional one positive case, while the difference would be the pools having one less positive case. The number of positive cases in the former pools were determined using the ROUNDUP function for the predicted positive cases divided by the total number of pools; the number of positive cases in latter pools were determined using the ROUNDDOWN function. The number of tests to deconvolute each positive pool was all members in positive Row pools or Column pools.