What are some of the uses of PCR in real life?
1. It brings joy into the life of biochemistry nerds (see below for a couple of examples- there are thousands, today- examples, that is, not nerds): Since PCR can amplify a specific portion of DNA (because of the high selectivity of primer binding to target DNA), it can be used to isolate a single gene out of the hundreds of thousands of genes in a genome (just to give you an idea- a gene of 3000 bp (or less) can readily be fished out of a human genome of 3 billion bp). PCR makes isolating individual genes ridiculously easy compared to the methods that were available before PCR. It’s also possible to amplify genes from mRNA after the mRNA has been copied into DNA by using reverse transcriptase. PCR can also be used to introduce mutations into genes, which can then be studied to understand the effects of these mutations on the function of the encoded protein. 2. Since it is possible to amplify large amounts of DNA from tiny traces, it is used by forensic labs to get sufficient DNA from
