What is Polymerase Chain Reaction?

The Polymerase Chain Reaction, more commonly called as the PCR was a startling invention made by Kary B.Mullis in 1983. Simply put, Polymerase Chain Reaction enables one to amplify a desired stretch of DNA many number of times or even millions of times. Initially, the process was a cumbersome one but with the discovery of a thermostable enzyme called Taq polymerase, the whole process has become automated.

Polymerase Chain Reaction is one of the best inventions yet in the field of biotechnology which transformed a chemist into a billionaire almost overnight...you could say! The technique uses a set of short stretches of nucleotides called as primers. These primers bind in such a way that they amplify the regions of the target DNA that they flank. Thus you can start with a drop of DNA and end up producing million times that using this polymerase chain reaction! One of the recent developments in this area is the reverse transcriptase- polymerase chain reaction otherwise called as the RT-PCR. It enables one to amplify specific RNA populations within a cell. This in turn would give one knowledge about the metabolic status of the cell… very useful to diagnose disease or abnormal conditions.