Question

A crime scene reveals a tiny amount of genetic material that may be linked with the guilty person. This small amount of DNA may be amplified, or copied many times over, through a process called ___________ ___________ ___________.

Answer 1

Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)

Step-by-step explanation:

Polymerase chain reaction is a molecular biology procedure/technique used to amplify or multiply specific segments of a DNA. The process makes use of taq polymerase (an enzyme), primers, the DNA of interest and nucleotides.

All the reactants are subjected to repeated heating and cooling cycles during which the DNA of interest is synthesized in multiples. The process can be broken down to 3 basic steps:

• Denaturation of the target DNA by heat to separate the DNA strands
• Binding of primers to their complementary DNA sequence at lower temperature
• Synthesis of new DNA through addition of nucleotides to primers by the taq polymerase. This happens at higher temperature than the second step but lower than the first step.

The steps are repeated at the end of each cycle which can last between 2 to 4 hours depending on the length of the target DNA. Newly synthesized DNA at every cycle forms a template for the production of another strand. Hence, multiple copies of the target DNA can be produced within a short period.