RT-PCR - dumb question (Oct/22/2004 )
Is REVERSE TRANSCRIPTASE-PCR and REAL-TIME PCR the same thing?
If not, what dummy decided to use RT-PCR as the acrinym for both?
no it isn't.
RT-PCR as reverse transcriptase PCR means a combination of first reversely transcribing RNA into cDNA, followed by a "normal" PCR. This can be done in seperate steps, but "one-tube" reaction mixes are also available.
RT-PCR as real-time PCR is the quantitative detection (by increase in flourescence) of templates with either Lightcycler or Taqman methods. I.e. you can watch when your PCR-reaction is starting or in the exponential phase...
the template used for real-time PCR can be cDNA generated by reverse transcription, though.
why the two have the same acronyms is purely coincidental. real-time PCR is often abreviated as qRT-PCR, meaning quantitative real-time PCR.
BTW, RT-PCR isn't room-temperature PCR either, as a student around here asked some time ago! 
mike
can someone gimme an example when reverse trancriptase will be used instead of real time PCR and vice versa. Thanks
you can use reverse transcriptase for detecting specific transcripts, i.e. only to know if it is present of absent. knowing that a gene is expressed, real time can be used for detecting the transcript levels of this gene.
If not, what dummy decided to use RT-PCR as the acrinym for both?
Most times when someone is talking about RT-PCR they mean reverse transcriptase PCR. Real time PCR is usually written out.
Reverse transcriptase PCR and real time PCR can be used together or separately, one is not mutually exclusive of the other. Let's say that you want to know if a certain transcript is upregulated in your mutant of interest. You can perform RT-PCR using a conventional PCR machine to give you a rough idea of the transcript levels in your mutant, and you can perform a control (such as actin) side by side for comparison to give you a general idea of how much more abudnant it is. Sometimes this is enough for a given experiment to convince someone that your hypothesis is correct. However, you can also be more diligent about it, and now use real time PCR to give you a more accurate determination of how much transcript you have. It really depends on how accurate you need to be and how much of a difference you need to detect. A 40x difference is pretty easy to see using a conventional PCR machine, but a 1.5x difference would probably be done using real time PCR because the difference is so small and thus more prone to errors.
Also note that you can use real time PCR for basically any PCR you want to do - it doesn't have to be a reverse transcription PCR.