Ice-COLD-PCR Enables Rapid Amplification and Robust Enrichment for Low-abundance Unknown DNA Mutations

The researchers, funded by the National Cancer Institute and led by Professor Mike Makrigiorgos, have developed a new platform that incoporates a synthetic reference sequence within a PCR reaction. The addition is designed to enhance amplification of unknown DNA sequences during COLD-PCR. This is important because low-abundance mutations within wild-type DNA are important in a variety of fields of medicine, including cancer, prenatal diagnosis and
infectious diseases.

This technique will help to eliminate some of the problems that COLD-PCR has had in the past and will enable identification of mutation abundances down to 1% and 0.1% by Sanger seqeuncing and pyrosequencing respectively. 

The paper entitled 'Ice-COLD-PCR enables rapid amplification and robust enrichment for low-abundance unknown DNA mutations' can be read online  within Oxford Journals Nucleic Acids Research Title