Methodologic and biological variability of quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction analysis of Bcr-Abl expression in Philadelphia chromosome-positive acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Abstract

We examined to what extent technical and biological factors may affect the validity of Bcr-Abl polymerase chain reaction quantification in Philadelphia chromosome-positive acute lymphocytic leukemia and found that technical variance is the predominant limitation of the method and was not exceeded by biological variance. Interestingly the number of p210Bcr-Abl (b2a2 or b3a2) transcripts per blast was more then 10-fold higher than the number of p190Bcr-Abl copies per blast.