Figure 2.

Highly sensitive molecular techniques for ctDNA detection and characterization. Droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) is based on the partitioning of the sample into millions of water-in-oil droplets, so that each droplet contains a single DNA molecule that is amplified individually. BEAMing stands for beads, emulsion, amplification, and magnetics and is a type of dPCR, where amplified wild-type and mutant alleles are differentially labeled and are separated through flow cytometry. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches that employ massive parallel sequencing with improved technical and bioinformatics protocols to reduce errors have gained ground in ctDNA analysis. This image was created with the use of BioRender (https://biorender.com/) (accessed on 20 April 2023).