The AHV-1 FQ-PCR assay was highly reproducible and linear over a range of eight orders of magnitude from 10 2 to 10 9 copies, allowing a precise calculation of viral DNA load in samples containing a wide range of viral DNA amounts, eliminating the need for sample dilution and minimizing sample handling. The results for intra-and inter-assay precision indicate that both intra-assay and inter-assay CVs were satisfactorily low and the assay is reproducible, even between different batches of reagents used. Probability rather than sample quality variation is the predominant cause of variability at low copy numbers [27] .