Why did the invention of PCR make DNA fingerprinting possible?

1 Answer
Dec 2, 2016

With the invention of the PCR technique , DNA profiling took huge strides forward in both discriminating power and the ability to recover information from very small or degraded starting samples.

Explanation:

The process of PCR mimics the biological process of DNA replication but confines it to specific DNA sequences of interest.

In PCR process , the DNA sample is denatured into separate individual polynucleotide strands through heating. Two oligonucleotide DNA primers are used to hybridise to two corresponding nearby sites on opposite DNA strands. Thus two new copies of the sequences of interest are generated.

Repeated denaturation , hybridisation and extension in this fashion produce an exponentially growing number of copies of the DNA of interest.

Quantitative PCR methods enable automated , precise and high - throughput measurements.