Visual modeling paradigm is known for a number of decades already but still vast majority of software engineers prefer traditional programming to automated code generation from visual models. In this paper we discuss several ways to make modeling using diagrams more usable for industrial software development. Specialized domain-specific visual languages could be used to make models clearer and ...

Real-time PCR continues to have a major impact across many disciplines of the biological sciences and this has been a driver to develop and improve existing instruments. From the first two commercial platforms introduced in the mid 1990s, there is now a choice in excess of a dozen instruments, which continues to increase. Advances include faster thermocycling times, higher throughput, flexibili...

Optimisation of the reagents used to perform PCR is critical for reliable and reproducible results. As with any PCR initial time spent on optimisation of a real-time assay will be benefi cial in the long run. Specifi city, sensitivity, effi ciency and reproducibility are the important criteria to consider when optimising an assay and these can be altered by changes in the primer concentration, ...

Real-time PCR is a powerful tool to compare relative transcriptional abundance, and has been broadly applied in biomedical sciences. However, methods for rigorous statistical analyses have lagged behind applications. Confidence interval and statistical significance considerations are not explicit in many of the current data analysis approaches. Based on the standard curve method and other usefu...

The real-time polymerase chain reaction (real-time PCR) is a recent modification to PCR (UNIT 10.2) that is rapidly changing the nature of how biomedical science research is conducted. It was first introduced in 1992 by Higuchi and coworkers and has seen a rapid increase in its use since (Higuchi et al., 1992, 1993). Real-time PCR allows precise quantification of specific nucleic acids in a com...