Nucleic acid amplification

Abstract

Disclosed are compositions and methods for amplification of nucleic acid sequences of interest. It has been discovered that amplification reactions can produce amplification products of high quality, such as low amplification bias, if performed on an amount of nucleic acid at or over a threshold amount and / or on nucleic acids at or below a threshold concentration. The threshold amount and concentration can vary depending on the nature and source of the nucleic acids to be amplified and the type of amplification reaction employed. Disclosed is a method of determining the threshold amount and / or threshold concentration of nucleic acids that can be used with nucleic acid samples of interest in amplification reactions of interest. Because amplification reactions can produce high quality amplification products, such as low bias amplification products, below the threshold amount and / or concentration of nucleic acid, such below-threshold amounts and / or concentrations can be used in amplification reactions.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application is a divisional of co-pending application Ser. No. 10 / 429,229, filed May 2, 2003, which is a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 10 / 272,465, now issued U.S. Pat. No. 7,074,600, filed Oct. 15, 2002, which is a continuation-in-part of copending application Ser. No. 09 / 982,212, now issued U.S. Pat. No. 6,617,137, filed Oct. 18, 2001, which is a continuation of copending application Ser. No. 09 / 977,868, now issued U.S. Pat. No. 6,977,148, filed Oct. 15, 2001, each of which applications and issued patents are hereby incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0002]The disclosed invention is generally in the field of nucleic acid amplification.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0003]A number of methods have been developed for exponential amplification of nucleic acids. These include the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), ligase chain reaction (LCR), self-sustained sequence replication (3SR), nuclei...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0009]It was also discovered that exposure of nucleic acids to alkaline conditions, reduction of the pH of nucleic acids exposed to alkaline conditions, and incubation of the resulting nucleic acids at or over a threshold amount and / or at or below a threshold concentration can produce amplification products with low amplification bias. Such an alkaline / neutralization procedure can improve the quality of the amplification products. The quality of the amplification products can be measured in a variety of ways, including, but not limited to, amplification bias, allele bias, locus representation, sequence representation, allele representation, locus representation bias, sequence representation bias, percent representation, percent locus representation, percent sequence representation, and other measures that indicate unbiased and / or complete amplification of the input nucleic acids.

[0033]Also disclosed is a method for amplifying and repairing damaged DNA. This method is useful, for example, for amplifying degraded genomic DNA. The method involves substantially denaturing a damaged DNA sample (generally via exposure to heat and alkaline conditions), removal or reduction of the denaturing conditions (such as by reduction of the pH and temperature of the denatured DNA sample), and replicating the DNA. The damaged DNA is repaired during replication by increasing the average length of the damaged DNA. For example, the average length of DNA fragments can be increase from, for example, 2 kb in the damaged DNA sample to, for example, 10 kb or greater for the replicated DNA. This repair method can result in an overall improvement in amplification of damaged DNA by increasing the average length of the product, increasing the quality of the amplification products by 3-fold (by, for example, increasing the marker representation in the sample), and improving the genotyping of amplified products by lowering the frequency of allelic dropout; all compared to the results when amplifying damaged DNA by other methods. The removal of denaturing conditions can allow denatured strands of damaged DNA to hybridize to other denatured damaged DNA. The replication can be multiple displacement amplification. Substantial denaturation and transient denaturation of the DNA samples generally is carried out such that the DNA is not further damaged. This method can generally be combined or used with any of the disclosed amplification methods.

Problems solved by technology

Since DNA yield from human samples is frequently limiting, much effort has been invested in general methods for propagating and archiving genomic DNA.

Whole genome PCR has the same disadvantages as other forms of PCR.

However, WGA methods suffer from high cost or insufficient coverage and inadequate average DNA size (Telenius et al., Genomics.

It is not possible to use the polymerase chain reaction to amplify them because the mRNA mixture is complex, typically consisting of 5,000 to 20,000 different molecular species.

The polymerase chain reaction has the disadvantage that different molecular species will be amplified at different rates, distorting the relative concentrations of mRNAs.

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