US Patent 7630837 Real-time gene quantification with internal standards

The present invention is directed to a nucleic acid quantification kit and method for determining the initial concentration or mass fraction of a target nucleic acid present in a sample. Illustrative embodiments include real-time competitive quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to determine the copy number or mass fraction of a target nucleic acid sequence in a sample and use of a thermodynamically based signal processing algorithm, with or without PCR, to provide mass fraction information.