TaqMan genotyping assays for Malaysian Chinese Beta thalassaemia mutations

The present invention discloses a rapid, sensitive and cost-effective in-house TaqMan 5 genotyping assay for the screening of common thalassemia mutations in Malaysian Chinese. The present invention comprises of four sets of forward and reverse primers for DNA amplification of the four common thalassemia mutations in Malaysian Chinese and four sets of normal and mutant probes. The probes were designed with minor groove binder (MGB) and non-fluorescent quencher (NFQ) at the 3' end, 10 whereas the 5' end contains fluorescence reporter dyes selected from the group of 2-chloro-7-phenyl-1,4-dichloro-6-carboxyfluorescein (VIC), 6-carboxyfluorescein (FAM) or the like.