The selected specimens were consecutively collected in the time periods May–August 2000 and March–May 2001 without any knowledge of infection status, clinical signs or symptoms. Of the female urethral and cervical swabs,Clonixin were pairs from the same patients. Ureaplasmas have been inconsistently associated with NGU and pregnancy complications. Distinction between the two species of ureaplasmas is essential in a research setting and may also prove important in a clinical setting. Besides providing a quick result compared with culture, which takes up to 5 days, qPCR provides a quantitative estimate of the bacterial load in a sample, which is not possible by conventional PCR. Furthermore, conventional culture techniques cannot differentiate the two ureaplasma species and is sometimes invalidated by overgrowth of other bacteria. The sensitivity of the qPCR was 96% and 95% in female urethral and cervical swabs, respectively. In male urethral swabs, the sensitivity was BIO-Acetoxime. This is in very close agreement with previous studies comparing PCR and culture for detection of ureaplasmas. Blanchard et al. found an overall sensitivity of 92%, and Povlsen et al. found a sensitivity of 96% for undifferentiated female specimens and 91% for specimens from male patients. In contrast to Povlsen et al. we found no difference in the sensitivity for the two ureaplasma species. In the present study mainly specimens with a low bacterial load as determined by culture were negative by qPCR. One of the main reasons for the lower sensitivity in such specimens resides in the inherent difficulties of PCR in accommodating a larger proportion of the clinical specimen. Whereas the sample preparation used in this study allowed an input volume of template corresponding to less than 2 ml of the original sample, the input volume for culture was more than 100-fold higher, as 200 ml of the original sample was used as inoculum. Thus, in theory, specimens with, 100 CCU should not be detectable by PCR. However, as viability is not 100%, and as PCR may also detect non-viable ureaplasma cells, the sensitivity appears higher than theoretically possible. Obviously, alternative sample preparation methods that allow test of a larger volume of the original sample, could increase the sensitivity but at the cost of a possible higher risk of inhibition.