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RE: Quantitative PCR: A Brief Introduction
Great article! Well done!
Have you used betaine as an amplification enhancer? Here are a few references on this use of betaine (by no means a comprehensive list):
There is a connection though: Betaine is especially important now because it is useful for improving results with repetitive sequences, now used for DNA fingerprinting and much more. The first years of my career (1979-1986) I did early work on repetitive sequences, called satellite DNA at the time. Unfortunately that pre-dated PCR and it was not a tool we had, but in retrospect I think of all we could've done if we had PCR! We had to isolate a 3% fraction of DNA extracted by dissection of specific organs from crabs. We could not isolate enough DNA from a single animal for analytical methods available at the time, so we had to pool tissue from several animals for further analysis. With PCR we could have amplified the sequences of interest from a few mg of tissue.
No I never used betaine.