Enhancement of PCR Sensitivity and Yield Using Thiol-modified Primers

Various additives can enhance the quality of PCR amplification, but these generally require considerable optimization to achieve peak performance. Here, we demonstrate that the use of thiol-modified primers can enhance both PCR sensitivity and yield. In experiments with V. parahaemolyticus genomic DNA, this primer modification enhances PCR sensitivity by more than 100-fold, with accompanying improvements in amplicon yield. Then, an artificial plasmid with the same primer binding regions and different internal amplification sequence was designed. The result showed that the amplification also be improved by using the same thiol-modified primers. It indicated the enhancement was not caused by the effect of the thiol-modified primers on the second structure of amplification sequence. Subsequent experiments demonstrate that the effects of this modification are potentially due to altered interaction between the primers and proteins in the reaction mixture. Amplification with thiol-modified primers was strongly inhibited by the presence of extraneous proteins relative to standard DNA primers, which indicates that thiol-modified primers may be inhibited due to interaction with these proteins. In contaminant-free reactions, however, the thiol-modified primers might interact more strongly with DNA polymerase, which could in turn improve PCR amplification.