Part I. Introduction to PCR

A Short History of the Polymerase Chain Reaction
John M. S. Bartlett and David Stirling

PCR Patent Issues
Peter Carroll and David Casimir

Equipping and Establishing a PCR Laboratory
Susan McDonagh

Quality Control in PCR
David Stirling

Part II. Preparation of Nucleic Acid Templates

Extraction of Nucleic Acid Templates
John M. S. Bartlett

Extraction of DNA from Whole Blood
John M. S. Bartlett and Anne White

DNA Extraction from Tissue
Helen Pearson and David Stirling

Extraction of DNA from Microdissected Archival Tissues
James J. Going

RNA Extraction from Blood
Helen Pearson

RNA Extraction from Frozen Tissue
John M. S. Bartlett

RNA Extraction from Tissue Sections
Helen Pearson

Dual DNA/RNA Extraction
David Stirling and John M. S. Bartlett

DNA Extraction from Fungi, Yeast, and Bacteria
David Stirling

Isolation of RNA Viruses from Biological Materials
Susan McDonagh

Extraction of Ancient DNA
Wera M. Schmerer

DNA Extraction from Plasma and Serum
David Stirling

Technical Notes for the Detection of Nucleic Acids
John M. S. Bartlett

Technical Notes for the Recovery and Purification of PCR Products from Acrylamide Gels
David Stirling

Part III. Basic PCR Methods

PCR Primer Design
David L. Hyndman and Masato Mitsuhashi

Optimization of Polymerase Chain Reactions
Haiying Grunenwald

Subcycling PCR for Long-Distance Amplifications of Regions with High and Low Guanine-Cystine Content: Amplification of the Intron 22 Inversion of the FVIII Gene
David Stirling

Rapid Amplification of cDNA Ends
Xin Wang and W. Scott Young III

Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA Fingerprinting: The Basics
Ranil S. Dassanayake and Lakshman P. Samaranayake

Microsphere-Based Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Genotyping
Marie A. Iannone, J. David Taylor, Jingwen Chen, May-Sung Li, Fei Ye, and Michael P. Weiner

Ligase Chain Reaction
William H. Benjamin, Jr., Kim R. Smith, and Ken B. Waites

Nested RT-PCR in a Single Closed Tube
Antonio Olmos, Olga Esteban, Edson Bertolini, and Mariano Cambra

Direct PCR from Serum: Application to Viral Genome Detection
Kenji Abe

Long PCR Amplification of Large Fragments of Viral Genomes: A Technical Overview
Raymond Tellier, Jens Bukh, Suzanne U. Emerson, and Robert H. Purcell

Long PCR Methodology
Raymond Tellier, Jens Bukh, Suzanne U. Emerson, and Robert H. Purcell

Part IV. Ultrasensitive and Quantitative PCR

Qualitative and Quantitative PCR: A Technical Overview
David Stirling

Ultrasensitive PCR Detection of Tumor Cells in Myeloma
Friedrich W. Cremer and Marion Moos

Ultrasensitive Quantitative PCR to Detect RNA Viruses
Susan McDonagh

Quantitative PCR for cAMP RI Alpha mRNA: Use of Site-Directed Mutation and PCR Mimics
John M. S. Bartlett

Quantitation of Multiple RNA Species
Ron Kerr

Part V. Transcriptome Analysis

Differential Display: A Technical Overview
John M. S. Bartlett

AU-Differential Display, Reproducibility of a Differential mRNA Display Targeted to AU Motifs
Orlando Dominguez, Lidia Sabater, Yaqoub Ashhab, Eva Belloso, and Ricardo Pujol-Borrell

PCR Fluorescence Differential Display
Kostya Khalturin, Sergej Kuznetsov, and Thomas C. G. Bosch

Microarray Analysis Using RNA Arbitrarily Primed PCR
Steven Ringquist, Gaelle Rondeau, Rosa-Ana Risques, Takuya Higashiyama, Yi-Peng Wang, Steffen Porwollik, David Boyle, Michael McClelland, and John Welsh

Oligonucleoti