ML Estimation of DNA Initial Copy Number in Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) Processes

Estimation of DNA copy number in a given biological sample is an extremely important problem in genomics. This problem is especially challenging when the number of the DNA strands is minuscule, which is often the case in applications such as pathogen and genetic mutation detection. A recently developed technique, real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR), ampli es the number of initial target molecules by replicating them through a series of thermal cycles. Ideally, the number of target molecules doubles at the end of each cycle. However, in practice, due to biochemical noise the ef ciency of the PCR reaction, de ned as the fraction of target molecules which are successfully copied during a cycle, is al

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICASSP
• Authors: Haris Vikalo, Babak Hassibi, Arjang Hassibi
• Keywords: DNA Copy Number, ICASSP 2007, Real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction, Signal Processing, Target Molecules