Book review

Real-Time PCR in Microbiology: From Diagnosis to Characterization

The regulatory demand for quantitative results in environmental, food, and clinical microbiology has pushed real-time PCR to the forefront of such research fields due to its quick turn-around time and ready-made commercially available reagents. Despite its aggressive use, real-time PCR is often used without consideration of sampling bias, extraction efficiency, PCR inhibition, and other potentially confounding factors. An assembly of researchers, drawn from virology and biomedicine, provides a thorough review of real-time tools to date. The manuscript begins with a review of PCR fundamentals, continues to apprise the reader of the difficulties in quantification, and closes with a virtual roundtable invoking professional responses of variable use to the reader.

Particularly useful for real-time PCR novices are chapters 1 through 4. Fundamentals such as primer design, probe choice, and sample preparation are critically revisited, offering an excellent platform for assay design. The book's greatest contribution is the piece recounting popular standards and controls, because it is the standardization of protocols and reagents that encourage reproducible results over time and between labs. In this first section, the authors outline significant findings from the maturation of real-time PCR and amass a helpful collection of references for the researcher.

The chapters that follow diverge into a medley of applications of the tool. Chapter 8 highlights the investigation of respiratory viruses and, for the ARTI non-specialist, could be treated as a case study to illustrate complications and solutions that may span across fields. The comfortably redundant roundtable concluding the book features opinions ranging from how real-time PCR results should be published to future directions. The roundtable allows a tap into the pulse of clinical microbiology but is far less useful to the experiment designer than the early chapters.

This read is not necessarily for lab technicians but is indispensable for laboratory leadership considering real-time PCR and designing assays for the first time, as well as those presently using real-time PCR as a diagnosis tool.

Review by: Kate Field and Hyatt Green, Dept. of Microbiology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

Full details of the book available at Real-Time PCR in Microbiology: From Diagnosis to Characterization