Laboratory of Physical Biology, Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201800, China.
Integr Biol (Camb). 2012 Oct;4(10):1155-63. doi: 10.1039/c2ib20076g.
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has become a standard and important molecular biological technique with numerous applications in genetic analysis, forensics and in vitro diagnostics. Since its invention in the 1980s, there has been dramatic performance improvement arising from long-lasting efforts to optimize amplification conditions in both academic studies and commercial applications. More recently, a range of nanometer-sized materials including metal nanoparticles, semiconductor quantum dots, carbon nanomaterials and polymer nanoparticles, have shown unique effects in tuning amplification processes of PCR. It is proposed that these artificial nanomaterials mimic protein components in the natural DNA replication machinery in vivo. These so-called nanomaterials-assisted PCR (nanoPCR) strategies shed new light on powerful PCR with unprecedented sensitivity, selectivity and extension rate. In this review, we aim to summarize recent progress in this direction and discuss possible mechanisms for such performance improvement and potential applications in genetic analysis (particularly gene typing and haplotyping) and diagnostics.
聚合酶链反应（PCR）已经成为一种标准且重要的分子生物学技术，在遗传分析、法医学和体外诊断学中有广泛的应用。自 20 世纪 80 年代发明以来，通过在学术研究和商业应用中对扩增条件进行长期优化，其性能得到了显著提高。最近，一系列纳米级材料，包括金属纳米粒子、半导体量子点、碳纳米材料和聚合物纳米粒子，在调节 PCR 的扩增过程方面显示出了独特的效果。据推测，这些人工纳米材料模拟了体内天然 DNA 复制机制中的蛋白质成分。这些所谓的纳米材料辅助 PCR（nanoPCR）策略为具有空前灵敏度、选择性和延伸率的强大 PCR 开辟了新的途径。在这篇综述中，我们旨在总结这一领域的最新进展，并讨论这种性能提升的可能机制及其在遗传分析（特别是基因分型和单倍型分析）和诊断学中的潜在应用。
