Abstract: Plaque experiment and median tissue culture infective dose (TCID₅₀), both based on cell culture, are wildly used as the gold standard in discrimination of infectious viruses, but they are time consuming.Propidium monoazide (PMA) combined with quantitative PCR (qPCR) is a new method of discrimination between infectious virus and noninfectious viruses.Samples are given PMA pretreatment before qPCR.PMA inflitrates damaged capsid selectively, conbines the nucleic acid and inhibits its transcription and amplification.This review elaborates the mechanism of PMA-qPCR in detecting infectious viruses, summarizes the experiment condition of PMA pretreatment, and discusses the efficiency of different approaches in discrimination of infectious virus.