Enhanced specificity and efficiency of polymerase chain reactions using poly(amidoamine) dendrimers and derivatives.

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has become a fundamental technique in molecular biology. Improvements to enhance the specificity and efficiency of PCR are always required and remain a great challenge. Here we introduce generation 4 (G4) and 5 (G5) poly(amidoamine) (PAMAM) dendrimers and their derivatives with different terminal groups as a novel class of enhancers to improve the specificity and efficiency of PCR. We show that the dendrimers are effective in optimizing error-prone two-round PCR and non-specific PCR in specificity and efficiency. With the increase of the number and density of terminal amine groups, the optimum concentration of polycationic dendrimers could be decreased to as low as 1.35 nM, which is four orders of magnitude smaller than that of fully acetylated dendrimers and carboxyl-terminated dendrimers. The present study underlines a fact that dendrimers could be used as a powerful additive to enhance the specificity and efficiency of PCR.