High-efficiency thermal asymmetric interlaced PCR for amplification of unknown flanking sequences

Isolation of unknown DNA sequences flanked by known sequences is an important task in molecular biology research. Thermal asymmetric interlaced PCR (TAIL-PCR) is an effective method for this purpose. However the success rate of the original TAIL-PCR needs to be increased, and it is more desirable to obtain target products with larger sizes. Here we present a substantially improved TAIL-PCR procedure with special primer design and optimized thermal conditions. This high-efficiency TAIL-PCR (hiTAIL-PCR) combines the advantages of the TAIL-cycling and suppression-PCR, thus it can block the amplification of nontarget products and suppress small target ones, but allow efficient amplification of large target sequences. Using this method, we isolated genomic flanking sequences of T-DNA insertions from transgenic rice lines. In our tests, the success rates of the reactions were higher than 90%, and in most cases the obtained major products had sizes of 1-3 kb.