Fig. 4. Speed-up of PCR by sled-modified primers. During the annealing step of a thermal cycling PCR protocol (a), primers need to find and hybridise to their complement on a template. This process can be accelerated by attaching the pVIc sled peptide to PCR primers. (b) Amplicon formation for different primer-peptide conjugates is shown for annealing time t A = 1 s and primer concentration C primer = 0.125 μM. The C t threshold values for PCR reactions using unmodified primers, primer-S (negative control), primer-pVIc and primer-K were measured to be 21.7 ± 0.4, 22.1 ± 0.2, 16.7 ± 0.7, and 16 ± 0.5, respectively. Error bars indicate ±SD; n = 3.
