Abstract
AIM: Gene polymorphism biomarkers identify individual susceptibility to environmental and occupational hazards. The conventional approach considers polymerase chain reaction (PCR) followed by restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis (RFLP), a reliable but expensive and time-consuming two-step procedure. Therefore we evaluated the simpler method confronting two-pair primers (CTPP)-PCR for its robustness and applicability to epidemiologic studies. MATERIALS & METHODS: We compared CTPP-PCR and PCR-RFLP techniques to detect two NRF2 polymorphisms in a set of biological samples. RESULTS: CTPP-PCR produced contradictory results and required the orthogonal technique for confirming the data. CONCLUSION: In contrast to PCR-RFLP, CTPP-PCR of NRF2 polymorphisms resulted in ambiguous genotyping which strongly jeopardized heterozygosis classification. The necessity of long optimization and control procedures nullified the potential advantages of CTPP-PCR in terms of costs and time.