Viability PCR

Through the use of a simple pre-treatment of the sample by the means of specific intercalating photo-reactive reagents it's possible to neutralize the DNA of dead cells.

Examples of this are: food and water quality control, infectious diseases diagnostic, veterinary applications, ecological dynamics...

However, the main important advances were done by Nocker and colleagues, which demonstrated in successive works[2][3][4][5] the potential of this technology and also suggested Propidium monoazide as a better reagent for vPCR.

[6] This field still is in development, from 2003 up to 2015, the scientific evidences about the applicability of vPCR are stacking, nowadays main efforts are focused in procedure optimization.

Since a simple reagent mix with the sample, photo-activation and subsequent PCR not always shows expected results, each procedure needs some optimization.