Abstract
The ease and effectiveness of colony polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has allowed rapid amplification of DNA fragments and screening of large number of colonies of interest including transformants and mutants with genetic manipulations. Here, we evaluated colony PCR in Chlamydomonas. Individual colonies were treated with 10 mM ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) or Chelex-100 and the resulting clear cell lysate was used for PCR reaction. Either genomic DNA or plasmid DNA incorporated into the genome was equally amplified. We found that the Chelex method is superior to EDTA method in certain cases. This colony PCR technique will bypass the tedious process of isolating genomic DNA for PCR reaction and will make it possible for rapid amplification of genomic DNA fragments as well as rapid large-scale screening of transformants.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all other members of our laboratory for helpful discussion. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (#30671090, #30771084), National Basic Research Program of China (also called 973 program; no. 2007CB914401).
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Muqing Cao and Yu Fu contributed equally to this work.
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Cao, M., Fu, Y., Guo, Y. et al. Chlamydomonas (Chlorophyceae) colony PCR. Protoplasma 235, 107–110 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00709-009-0036-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00709-009-0036-9