Dehalococcoides species are responsible for the reductive dehalogenation of an impressive range of common, persistent environmental contaminants. These microorganisms are difficult to both obtain and grow in pure culture, and so are often studied while they exist in consortia using molecular techniques. In particular, a significant number of quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) assays targeting De...

Although viruses of haloarchaea are the predominant predator in hypersaline ecosystem, the culture studies about halovirus-host systems are infancy. The main reason is the tradition methodology (plaque assay) for virus-host interaction depends on culturable and susceptible host. Actually, more than 90% of haloarchaea are unculturable. Therefore, it is necessary to establish an approach for dete...

BACKGROUND Potentially pathogenic microorganisms can be detected by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) in sputum from patients with COPD, although how this technique relates to culture and clinical measures of disease is unclear. We used cross-sectional and longitudinal data to test the hypotheses that qPCR is a more sensitive measure of bacterial presence and is associated...

Copy number changes are known to be involved in numerous human genetic disorders. In this context, qPCR-based copy number screening may serve as the method of choice for targeted screening of the relevant disease genes and their surrounding regulatory landscapes. qPCR has many advantages over alternative methods, such as its low consumable and instrumentation costs, fast turnaround and assay de...

Honey-bee colony losses are an increasing problem in Western countries. There are many different causes, including infections due to various pathogens. Molecular biology techniques have been developed to reliably detect and identify honey-bee pathogens. The most sensitive, specific and reliable is the quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) methodology. This review of the litera...

Real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) is an indispensable molecular biology tool in the post-genome era. QPCR assays have become a robust and ideal tool for several applications such as clinical diagnostics, gene expression studies, biomarker discovery, and more. Using an intact genomic DNA (gDNA) template is crucial for generating meaningful qPCR data. Therefore, assessment of the gDNA integrity i...

BACKGROUND EvaGreen (EG) is a newly developed DNA-binding dye that has recently been used in quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR), post-PCR DNA melt curve analysis and several other applications. However, very little is known about the physicochemical properties of the dye and their relevance to the applications, particularly to qPCR and post PCR DNA melt curve analysis. In this paper, we characte...