The present invention discloses a rapid, sensitive and cost-effective in-house TaqMan 5 genotyping assay for the screening of common ?-thalassemia mutations in Malaysian Chinese. The present invention comprises of four sets of forward and reverse primers for DNA amplification of the four common ?-thalassemia mutations in Malaysian Chinese and four sets of normal and mutant probes. The probes were designed with minor groove binder (MGB) and non-fluorescent quencher (NFQ) at the 3 end, 10 whereas the 5 end contains fluorescence reporter dyes selected from the group of 2-chloro-7-phenyl-1,4-dichloro-6-carboxyfluorescein (VIC), 6-carboxyfluorescein (FAM) or the like.