Abstract: This invention relates to a new and novel method for significantly enhancing the sensitivity of assays aimed at detecting the presence of target deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) or ribonucleic acid (RNA) sequences in a sample. Specifically, this method applies to techniques that employ polymerase chain reactions (PCR.RTM.) or other nucleic amplification techniques to amplify copies of the target DNA or RNA (via reverse-transcriptase followed by PCR, Murakawa et al. 1988 DNA 7-287) to allow for detection. The method of the present invention combines the following four steps for the first time: DNA amplicon synthesis and amplification in a modified nucleic acid amplification technique (eg. PCR) using a target nucleic acid sequence as a template; amplicon transcription into RNA sequences with amplification thereof to generate a significantly increased number complementary RNA sequences (i.e.