The Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative Real-Time PCR Experiments (MIQE) guidelines are a set of protocols for conducting and reporting quantitative real-time PCR experiments and data, as devised by Bustin et al. in 2009. They were devised after a paper was published in 2002 that claimed to detect measles virus in children with autism through the use of RT-qPCR, but the results proved to be completely unreproducible by other scientists. The authors themselves also did not try to reproduce them and the raw data was found to have a large amount of errors and basic mistakes in analysis. This incident prompted Stephen Bustin to create the MIQE guidelines to provide a baseline level of quality for qPCR data published in scientific literature. Purpose The MIQE guidelines were created due to the low quality of qPCR data submitted to academic journals at the time, which was only becoming more common as Next Generation Sequencing machinery allowed for such experiments to be run for a cheaper cost. Because the technique is utilized across all of science in multiple fields, the instruments, methods, and designs of how qPCR is used differs greatly. To help improve overall quality, the MIQE guidelines were made as generalized suggestions on basic experimental procedures and forms of data that should be collected as a minimum level of reported information for other researchers to understand and use when reading the published material. Setting up a recognized and largely agreed upon set of guidelines such as these was deemed important by the scientific community especially due to the ever increasing amount of scientific work coming from developing countries with many different languages and protocols. History Original version developments In 2009, an international group of scientists headed by Stephen Bustin collaborated to put together a set of guidelines on how to perform qPCR and what forms of data should be collected and published in the process. This also allowed editors and reviewers of scientific journals to employ the guidelines when looking over a submitted paper that included qPCR data. Thus, the guidelines were set up as a sort of checklist for each step of the procedure with certain items being marked as essential (E) when submitting data for publication and others marked as just desirable (D). An additional version of the guidelines was published in September 2010 for use with fluorescence-based quantitative real-time PCR. It also acted as a précis