Skip to main content
PMC home page
Nucleic Acids Research logoLink to Nucleic Acids Research
. 1989 Mar 25;17(6):2197–2201. doi: 10.1093/nar/17.6.2197

Polymerase chain reaction: replication errors and reliability of gene diagnosis.

M Krawczak 1, J Reiss 1, J Schmidtke 1, U Rösler 1
PMCID: PMC317589  PMID: 2565023

Abstract

The impact of replication errors on the reliability of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) data is studied theoretically. Practical applications of our results to RFLP analysis and oligonucleotide probing confirm that for practical purposes replication errors can be neglected if a large number of starting templates (e.g. 100,000) is being used. For single locus analysis in single cells, however, the probability of false diagnosis due to such errors is of the order of 1 percent.

Full text

PDF
2200

Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

  1. Chien A., Edgar D. B., Trela J. M. Deoxyribonucleic acid polymerase from the extreme thermophile Thermus aquaticus. J Bacteriol. 1976 Sep;127(3):1550–1557. doi: 10.1128/jb.127.3.1550-1557.1976. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  2. Dunning A. M., Talmud P., Humphries S. E. Errors in the polymerase chain reaction. Nucleic Acids Res. 1988 Nov 11;16(21):10393–10393. doi: 10.1093/nar/16.21.10393. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  3. Newton C. R., Kalsheker N., Graham A., Powell S., Gammack A., Riley J., Markham A. F. Diagnosis of alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency by enzymatic amplification of human genomic DNA and direct sequencing of polymerase chain reaction products. Nucleic Acids Res. 1988 Sep 12;16(17):8233–8243. doi: 10.1093/nar/16.17.8233. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  4. Saiki R. K., Gelfand D. H., Stoffel S., Scharf S. J., Higuchi R., Horn G. T., Mullis K. B., Erlich H. A. Primer-directed enzymatic amplification of DNA with a thermostable DNA polymerase. Science. 1988 Jan 29;239(4839):487–491. doi: 10.1126/science.2448875. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  5. Saiki R. K., Scharf S., Faloona F., Mullis K. B., Horn G. T., Erlich H. A., Arnheim N. Enzymatic amplification of beta-globin genomic sequences and restriction site analysis for diagnosis of sickle cell anemia. Science. 1985 Dec 20;230(4732):1350–1354. doi: 10.1126/science.2999980. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  6. Scharf S. J., Horn G. T., Erlich H. A. Direct cloning and sequence analysis of enzymatically amplified genomic sequences. Science. 1986 Sep 5;233(4768):1076–1078. doi: 10.1126/science.3461561. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  7. Tindall K. R., Kunkel T. A. Fidelity of DNA synthesis by the Thermus aquaticus DNA polymerase. Biochemistry. 1988 Aug 9;27(16):6008–6013. doi: 10.1021/bi00416a027. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

Articles from Nucleic Acids Research are provided here courtesy of Oxford University Press

RESOURCES