Polymerase Chain Reaction Detection ofChlamydia pneumoniaein Circulating White Blood Cells

The detection of circulating breast cancer cells in peripheral blood by reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction.

Some circulating cancer cells in the blood play a central role in the metastatic process and may have a major influence on patient progress. Their numbers can be very small and techniques for their detection need to be both sensitive and specific. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has been successfully used to detect small numbers of tumor cells in cancer. We used a reverse transcriptase-polymera...

Detection of Plasmodium falciparum Directly from Blood Samples Using the Polymerase Chain Reaction

Detection of Babesia ovis Using Polymerase Chain Reaction.

Detection of Francisella tularensis in blood by polymerase chain reaction.

We developed a polymerase chain reaction-based assay for Francisella tularensis which we evaluated by using spiked blood samples and experimentally infected mice. The assay detected both type A and type B F. tularensis at levels equivalent to one CFU/microliter of spiked blood. Results from polymerase chain reaction-based assay of limiting dilutions of blood from mice infected with the live vac...

Sensitive detection of circulating breast cancer cells by reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction of maspin gene.

BACKGROUND Maspin, a recently identified protein related to the family of serpins, is believed to play a role in human breast cancer. In an effort to improve the present methods of detection, we have developed a reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay for maspin transcript to identify small numbers of mammary carcinoma cells in the peripheral blood and bone marrow of pati...