developed a method whereby a sample can be diluted and partitioned to the extent that single template molecules can be amplified individually, each in a separate partition, and the products detected using fluorescent probes (Vogelstein and Kinzler 1999). This approach transformed qPCR into digital-format qPCR because the results are binary — either positive or negative — and thus the new term “digital PCR” was coined for this generation of PCR methods.