Although the significant advantage for the probability density function (PDF) methods of the exact treatment of chemical reactions in turbulent combustion problems, a detailed chemistry mechanism (e.g., the GRI mechanism) has not been implemented in the practical calculations by now due to the prohibitive computation of PDF methods. In this work, a detailed mechanism (GRI-Mech 3.0, consisting of 53 species and 325 elemental reactions) is firstly incorporated into the PDF calculation of a turbulent non-premixed jet flame (Sandia Flame D). The flow is formulated in the boundary layer form. The joint composition PDF closure level is applied and a multiple-time-scale (NITS) k-epsilon turbulence model is combined for the closure of turbulent transport terms. The molecular mixing process is modelled by the Euclidean minimum spanning tree (EMST) mixing model. The solutions are obtained by using the space marching algorithm for turbulence equations and node-based Monte Carlo particle method for PDF evolution equation. The chemical reaction source terms are integrated directly. Extensive comparisons between the predictions and the measurements are made, which involve radial profiles of mean and rms (root mean square), conditional mean, scatter plots of scalars and conditional PDF distribution etc. The flame structures are well represented by the present calculation, including intermediate species (e.g. CO and H-2) mass fractions, pollutant NO emission and local extinction. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.