Figure 1.

Principles of Gene-Collector. (A) A multiplex PCR is carried out using target specific primer pairs, generating both correct and incorrect products. For clarity, only three of the 170 primer pairs are shown and are color coded. (B) Guided by the collector probe, targets that contain matched primer pairs are circularized, leaving non-cognate products linear and thus susceptible to exonuclease degradation. In detail, (I) a collector probe contains complementary sequences to a cognate primer pair (orange). (II) The collector probe and the DNA ligase enable circularization of correctly amplified targets. (C) A universal amplification is then carried out using a randomly primed rolling circle amplification, generating a final product of concatemers of correct target sequences.