jeudi 6 mai 2010

The Real-time PCR

Now you know few conventional PCR weblinks to jog your memory, here are other links about qPCR :

* First, a little note for all the subsequent articles : abbrevations.
Indeed, PCR is a constant evolution topic and technical abbreviations can mean different things even with the same acronym. Here are the most used ones, even if a new order try to organize this with a paper like MIQE :

- qPCR :quantitative PCR quantitative (or real-time)
- RT-PCR : Reverse Transcription PCR
- RT-qPCR : Reverse Transcription quantitative PCR
- PCR-ELISA
- One step RT-qPCR
- Two step RT-qPCR

The bigger pitfall is to liken RT-PCR to "Real-time PCR" instead of "Reverse Transcription PCR". It was the case before qPCR was developped but it is a little bit confusing now.
So, be aware to make the difference between them and to check it in all written or web papers that can be found what is really described.

* I come back to my little pretty useful links.
As said in my first post, one of my reference site remains "Gene. quantification.info" to find many details about PCR in general.

But many others tutorials and websites are also very interesting for people wanting to find the answer to their question, here is a little list :

- qPCR fmo South Carolina University (link)
- qPCR frmo Iowa University (link)
- Tevfik Dorak website, many PCR papers autor, a bit messy but really interesting news to find (link)
- A really nice synthesis made by a french genetics team but in french (link)
- A paper pretty well done in synthesis about the technique from Wilhelm in 2003 (link)

Many other links can be obviously found but the content is not always very good, not to say that sometimes they comprise mistakes.

For example, I went to Wikipedia page about "quantitative PCR". From my point of view, it comprises many imprecisions, risky shortcuts and lack of strictness in explanations, thing that can confuse a reader more than become clearer. So to avoid as a single and unique reference.

Finally, I will talk about PCR system design in a next post...

Have a good run...