The sensitivity of the nested PCR
To determine the sensitivity of the nested PCR developed
in this study, we performed the PCR using 10-fold
serially diluted template DNA extracted from a plasma
with a concentration of 2000 copies/ml HBV DNA. As
shown in Figure 1, the minimum copies detected by the
three sets of the primers were all 20 copies/ml HBV DNA, equivalent to 1 copy per reaction. Thus, the lower
detection limit of the nested PCR using the different
primers was comparable.