Biochemistry, Polymerase Chain Reaction

Excerpt

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is widely employed in basic science and biomedical research. PCR is a laboratory technique to amplify specific DNA segments for various laboratory and clinical applications. Building on the work of Panet and Khorana’s successful amplification of DNA in-vitro, Mullis and coworkers developed PCR in the early 1980s, having been met with a Nobel prize only a decade later.

Allowing for more than the billion-fold amplification of specific target regions, this reaction has become instrumental in many applications, including gene cloning, the diagnosis of infectious diseases, and prenatal screening for deleterious genetic abnormalities.