Assumption-free analysis of quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) data.

It is shown that the first approach can lead to PCR efficiencies that vary over a 0.2 range, whereas the second approach may be off by 0.26, and proposed linear regression on the Log(fluorescence) per cycle number data as an assumption-free method to calculate starting concentrations of mRNAs and PCRefficiencies for each sample.