Copper coordination-driven self-assembly and encapsulation of PCR reagents

Abstract

Polymerase chain reactions (PCR) are a very important tool for use in cloning, nucleic acid sequencing and diagnostic testing. The storage conditions of PCR reagents are limited to freezing and a lot of mixing steps are needed. In this paper, we report using metal ions to form coordination nanomaterials with the intrinsic components of the PCR reagents including dNTP, DNA primers and DNA polymerase as an integrated PCR reaction system. To complete PCR reactions, users need only to dissolve the coordination nanomaterials with a buffer and add template DNA. A few transition metal ions were screened and Cu2+ was found to be the most effective metal ion for this purpose. Then the encapsulation efficiency of PCR reagents was measured, which can reach close to 100% for the primers and DNA polymerase, but only 10% for dNTP because dNTP was excess. Further study also exhibited this integrated PCR reaction system can be used for DNA detection with a similar detection limit to the normal PCR, and showed good stability of encapsulated PCR nanomaterial after storage for a week.