PCR inhibition is a major cause for erroneous qPCR results. It is the exponential nature of PCR that makes it extremely sensitive to inhibition. Various approaches were developed during the years to detect PCR inhibition. The most common one is Internal Amplification Control (IAC), a known amount of nucleic acids added to the sample and quantified together with the target sequence.

There are various approaches to design and use of IAC, but they all suffer from the same basic problem. To mimic the effect of the inhibitor on the target sequence the IAC sequence has to be as similar as possible to the target sequence, which means they compete on the same primers and other resources of the reaction. The competition on resources might severely affect the accuracy and sensitivity of quantification.

Kinetics Outlier Detection (KOD) is a family of computational tools for detection of PCR inhibition by the shape of the curve. The KOD version implemented in Kineret is based on comparison of two kinetics parameters of each test reaction to the same kinetics parameters from a set of reactions that their quality was verified in advance, and to which the test reaction needs to be similar. These reactions referred to as 'reference set'.