Evaluation of gold nanoparticles as the additive in real-time polymerase chain reaction with SYBR Green I dye.

Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) have been proven to be able to improve the specificity or increase the efficiency of a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) when a suitable amount of AuNPs was used. However, there is still a lack of systematic evaluation of AuNPs in real-time PCR. In this study, DNA degradation and the fluorescence quenching effect of AuNPs were first tested in real-time PCR. Then two different kinds of Taq DNA polymerase, native and recombinant Taq polymerase, were employed to evaluate the AuNPs' effect on the threshold cycle (C(T)) values, standard curves and melting curves in real-time PCR. Different ratios of the amount of native Taq DNA polymerase to the amount of AuNPs were also tested. It was found that AuNPs could be applied in real-time PCR with correlation coefficient R(2)>0.989. The combination of 2.09 nM AuNPs with 3.75 U of native Taq DNA polymerase could make the amplification curves shift to the left and enhance the efficiency of the real-time PCR (0.628 39 without AuNPs compared with 0.717 89 with 2.09 nM AuNPs), thus enabling faster detection in comparison with those of control samples. However, no improvement ability of AuNPs was found in real-time PCR based on recombinant rTaq DNA polymerase. Besides, the results suggest that a complex interaction exists between AuNPs and native Taq DNA polymerase.