Customer Reviews

Real-time PCR (Advanced Methods)

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This is a good guide for getting started; I highly recommend it to graduate students or others diving into real time for the first time. It's also nice to have around as a reference when you start something new or need a refresher on data analysis and interpretation. I'm glad I bought it.

This is an excellent book for starters, like myself, in the technique of Real-time PCR, and it will not disappoint more advanced users who wish to refresh their knowledge or learn alternative meethods or correction strategies that apply to their protocols.
In attempting to be comprehensive, it may sometimes sound superficial when it mentions an aspect of the subject without delving deeper into it. This is especially true of the chapters on normalization and statistical analysis, where the reader is often referred to Stephen Bustin's A-Z of Quantitative PCR. Incidentally, Bustin himself is a co-author of this book.
All in all, it helps a lot in giving self-confidence to scientists who wish to know whether their analysis of quantitative data is correct. I carry my copy with me to the lab and consult it whenever I want to know whether I can rule out background noise or differences in efficiency in fold changes for my experiments, for example. The explanations on the different chemistries and the study of amplification curves is very attentive to detail and one never gets lost in equations. The part on melt curve analysis for SYBR protocols is unfortunately shallow, but this is a minor flaw in an overall good introductory book.
Another point in favour of this purchase is the care the authors take to provide examples of protocols, step by step, including volumes and concentrations, in the end of each chapter. They also supply examples of useful sites in the Internet that supply analysis tools, and do not refrain from citing brands and models of thermal cyclers, discussing briefly their signal detection methods.
One should not be fooled by its publication date, though. They say 2009, but it is only an unmodified reprint of the 2006 edition. Also, only the first eight chapters are dedicated to the technique as a whole: the remaining are protocols and discussions on specific applications that will interest those who perform similar analyses.