Open Access

PCR

Polymerase chain reaction is a method widely used to rapidly make millions to billions of copies of a specific DNA sample, allowing scientists to take a very small sample of DNA and amplify it to a large enough amount to study in detail The majority of PCR methods rely on thermal cyclingThermal cycling exposes reactants to repeated cycles of heating and cooling to permit different temperature-dependent reactions – specifically, DNA melting and enzyme driven DNA replication. PCR employs two main reagents – primers (which are short single strand DNA fragments known as oligonucleotides that are a complementary sequence to the target DNA region) and a DNA polymerase In the first step of PCR, the two strands of the DNA double helix are physically separated at a high temperature in a process called Nucleic acid denaturation