Results
We showed that the addition of the 3′dideoxy blocker suppressed but did not eliminate false-positive amplification from the wild-type template. However, the addition of the PCR specificity enhancer near eliminated false-positive amplification from the wild-type allele. Further discrimination between true and false positives was enabled by using the quantification cycle (Cq) value of a single mutant template as a cut-off point, thus enabling robust distinction between true and false positives. As 10,000 JAK2 templates were used per replicate, the assay had a sensitivity of 1/10-4 per replicate. Greater sensitivity could be reached by increasing the number of replicates analysed. Variation in replicates when low mutant-allele templates were present necessitated the use of a statistics-based approach to estimate the load of mutant JAK2 copies. QuanTAS-PCR showed comparable quantitative results when validated against a commercial assay.