DNA polymerase-catalyzed elongation of repetitive hexanucleotide sequences: application to creation of repetitive DNA...

We demonstrate the elongation of various hexanucleotide sequences with thermophilic DNA polymerase, under isothermal or thermal cyclic reaction conditions. We prepared 10 types of double repeat hexanucleotide duplexes with various GC compositions containing between 0 and 6 GC nucleotides per repeat and incubated these duplexes with thermophilic Taq DNA polymerase and dNTPs at various temperatures. All of the model repetitive short duplexes were elongated under the isothermal incubation conditions, although there were some differences in the elongation efficiencies derived from the GC composition in the repetitive sequences. It was also found that all of the model repetitive duplexes were extended more effectively by a 3-step thermal cyclic reaction involving denaturation, annealing, and extension. On the basis of this technique, we prepared a glutamate-encoding short repetitive duplex and created long repetitive DNAs under isothermal and thermal cyclic reaction conditions. DNA sequencing analysis of the cloned repetitive DNA revealed that well-ordered long repetitive DNAs of various chain lengths were created by this DNA polymerase-catalyzed ligation method, and these were easily cloned into vectors by the TA-cloning method. This method could be useful for obtaining DNAs encoding arbitrary long repetitive amino acid sequences more effectively than the conventional T4 ligase-catalyzed ligation method.