The appearance of genetically modified organisms on the food market a few years ago, and the demand for more precise and reliable techniques to detect foreign (transgenic or pathogenic) DNA in edible plants, have been the driving force for the introduction of real-time PCR techniques in plant research. This was followed by numerous fundamental research applications aiming to study the expression profiles of endogenous genes and multigene families. Since then, the interest in this technique in the plant scientist community has increased exponentially. This review describes the technical features of quantitative real-time PCR that are especially relevant to plant research, and summarizes its present and future applications.