Progress of Nucleic Acid Amplification Technologies

Nucleic acid amplification is the base of the study of molecular biology. With the development of biotechnology, more and more technology of nucleic acid amplification has been emerged. There are two kinds of nucleic acid amplification based on the amplification characteristic of these technologies. One is the target amplification, including Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), Strand displacement amplification (SDA), Ligase Chain Reaction (LCR), Nucleic acid sequence based amplification (NASBA), Qβ replicase, Transcription mediated amplification (TMA) and Rolling circle amplification (RCA); the other is the signal amplification, including Branched DNA ( bDNA) and Invader et al. The theories, characteristics and applications of these amplification technologies were introduced.;