Author(s)

S. Schnell & C. Mendoza

Abstract

The enzymological principles of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and of the quantitative competitive PCR (QC-PCR) are discussed, proposing a theoretical framework that will facilitate quantitation in experimental methodologies. Ex- pressions for the efficiency of the PCR and QC-PCR are also derived that enable a complete description of their cycle dependence. 1 Introduction The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a powerful technique for enzymatic amplification of specific segments of DNA (or mRNA) [1, 2, 3, 4]. It has rapidly become a technique of choice due to its capabilities in the detection and amplification of low-copy segments, being used in a wide and growing range of molecular biology applications. However

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