The Protein Man's Blog | A Discussion of Protein Research

With more than one million cases in 208 countries and territories around the world, the scientific and medical communities are on a race against time to find a viable prevention and treatment plan for the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and its associated disease, COVID-19, which has already claimed tens of thousands of lives to date. This challenge has led them to focus on how the virus breaks into human cells.

How Does the Coronavirus Infect Target Cells?

Plasmid isolation is crucial to biology and an essential step in various procedures, including cloning, DNA sequencing, transfection, in vitro translation, blotting, and gene therapy. However, these applications require the isolation of high-purity plasmid DNA. Whereas genomic DNA extraction is simple and straightforward, plasmid DNA extraction can be more complicated.

A DNA Polymerase is a vital biological enzyme that is present in DNA replication. In the process, DNA copies into two daughter DNA molecules and synthesizes a new DNA strand from the existing strand by adding dNTPs to the growing DNA.

The polymerase chain reaction is a widely used technique for amplification of DNA products for genetic studies, DNA fingerprinting, clinical diagnostics, forensics and many more. Non-specific amplification of PCR products and the formation of primer dimers are the major problems during a PCR reaction. The main reason is due to the mild activity of polymerases at low temperatures and the binding of primers at nonspecific sites. As a result, even before the start of PCR amplification non-specific gene products and primer dimers are formed. The yield of target DNA is reduced as the polymerase, nucleotides, and primers are consumed. Hot start PCR methods are used to avoid this problem.