Real-time polymerase chain reaction detection of Cryptococcus neoformans and Cryptococcus gattii in human samples

We report a TaqMan (R) real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) protocol for diagnosing cryptococcosis. Specificity was tested with 33 fungal strains. The 7 clinical samples found positive by culture also tested positive by real-time PCR. No false negatives were found among the 94 clinical samples that were negative by culture for Cryptococcus spp. The sensitivity threshold was about 10 plasmid copies per assay. Crown Copyright (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.