MATH 003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Thermus Aquaticus, Unwell, Eria
Document Summary
Polymerase chain reaction (pcr) is a common laboratory technique used to make many copies (millions or billions!) of a particular region of dna. Typically, the goal of pcr is to make enough of the target dna region that it can be analyzed or used in some other way. The dna polymerase typically used in pcr is called taq polymerase, after the heat-tolerant bacterium from which it was isolated (thermus aquaticus): aquaticus lives in hot springs and hydrothermal vents. Its dna polymerase is very heat- stable and is most active around 70 c (a temperature at which a human or e. coli dna polymerase would be nonfunctional). As we"ll see, high temperature is used repeatedly in pcr to denature the template. Pcr primers are short pieces of single-stranded dna, usually around 2020nucleotides in length. Two primers are used in each pcr reaction, and they are designed so that they flank the target region (region that should be copied).
