Digital PCR and Its Potential Application to Microbiology

A digital PCR (dPCR) takes a PCR and subdivides it across a large number of smaller reactions, termed partitions, so that a number of the partitions contain no template molecules. Many of the ideas that underpin dPCR were described in the late 1980s and early 1990s (1) and applied at that time using conventional or nested PCR. However, the procedure originally required partitioning of a single sample using individual tubes or a 96-well plate, followed by amplicon detection by agarose gel electrophoresis. This initial format represented a very unwieldy technique and an inefficient use of time and resources.