Biological Threat Identification and Countermeasure Centre of the Military, Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology,
2 Lubelska St., 24-100 Puławy, Poland
The nested PCR has been used to evaluate the usefulness and efficiency of different Bacillus anthracis spore
isolation methods in contaminated soil samples. The best results were obtained using two methods described by Beyer
et al. [1] and Cheun et al. [9]. Outer and inner pairs of primers were designed from the protective antigen gene of
plasmid pXO1 as well as from genes B and C of the capsule region of the plasmid pXO2. The influence of soil types on
obtained results was also studied. type of soil samples not affect the nested PCR results. Furthermore, the
sensitivity of nested PCR and PCR – ELISA was also examined.