Gauri Jairath (gaurilpt@gmail.com)
Ph.D. Scholar at Department of Livestock Products Technology, LUVAS, Hisar-1 25004
Introduction
The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is ascientific technique in molecular biologyto amplify a single or a few
copies of a piece of DNA across several orders of magnitude, generating thousands to millions of copies of a
particular DNA sequence. Polymerase Chain Reaction was developed in 1 984 by the American biochemist, Kary
Mullis. Mullis received the Nobel Prize and the Japan Prize for developing PCR in 1 993 (Bartlett, 2003).The
polymerase chain reaction can be used to amplify both double and single stranded DNA and is a powerful
technique that has rapidly become one of the most widely used techniques in molecular biology because it is
quick, inexpensive and simple.
In order to perform PCR, one must know at least a portion of the sequence of the target DNA molecule that has to be copied. Generally, PCR amplifies small DNA targets 1 00-1 000 base pairs (bp) long. I t is technically difficult to amplify targets >5000 bp long (Sridhar Rao, 2006).
