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Updated: May 7, 2026

Nucleoside Triphosphates - From Synthesis to Biochemical Characterization
Published on: April 3, 2014
5-Methyldeoxycytidine enhances the substrate activity of DNA polymerase
Tian Tian1, Shuang Peng, Heng Xiao
1College of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences, Key Laboratory of Biomedical Polymers of Ministry of Education, State Key Laboratory of Virology, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei 430072, P. R. China. xzhou@whu.edu.cn srwang@whu.edu.cn.
Abstract:
Here, we first demonstrated that 5-MedCTP could be incorporated into the synthetic DNA template by the exonuclease deficient Klenow fragment with a much higher efficiency than dCTP and 5-hydroxymethyl-dCTP. Further, we first conducted a comparable study of primer extension reaction using templates containing deoxycytidine (dC) or 5-methyldeoxycytidine (5-mdC) for incorporating different triphosphates. Based on our findings, 5-methyldeoxycytidine could enhance the substrate activity of the Klenow fragment (exo-) and this feature could potentially be used in DNA methylation analysis.
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