Talk:PCR mutagenesis

Merge proposal
Merge proposal: essentially the same information on both pages, Site-directed mutagenesis has a subsection describing this technique better than it is described here, and is prob more relevent there too.Philman132 (talk) 10:42, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
 * The original text was a mistake - PCR mutagenesis is something different from what was described, and what's described wasn't PCR mutagenesis (the process described involved thermocycling which is not the same thing as PCR). There are three possible options - 1) merge into site-directed mutagenesis; 2) keep it as it is, but expanded the article to describe fully PCR mutagenesis (and there are many methods of PCR mutagenesis); 3) rename the article.   I don't think there is much call for option 2 - i.e description of various methods of PCR mutagenesis because these methods aren't used much in laboratory nowadays and are increasing irrelevant, therefore can be described in the site-directed mutagenesis page.    Option 3 to rename it to describe a method of full-plasmid mutagenesis (that was what the article was originally intended for) is a possibility because this is the most common method (or methods) used nowadays.  The name might be problematic however, because I don't know if there is a specific name for that process apart from the name of the various commercial kits used for such methods.  Hzh (talk) 15:42, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Merge. It's only a paragraph, so a merge would be fine with me. This might also get rid of the "insufficient context" issue. Have you got a source for your description? (btw, thanks for the correction.) --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 15:55, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
 * There isn't a single PCR mutagenesis method (it's a general process, it just means mutagenesis using PCR), so there isn't one source. I only gave the barest information which would fit most (if not all) PCR-based mutagenesis methods, and there are a huge number of them.  You can find descriptions of some of these PCR-based mutagenesis methods in the book In Vitro Mutagenesis Protocols (Methods in Molecular Biology), 2nd edition, edited by Jeff Braman ( ISBN-13|978-0896039100 ).  It's interesting that the method that is described in Chapter 21 by Costa et al. is the one closest to the method originally described in the article, and it used the term PCR mutagenesis.  However, the Costa et.al method looks indeed to be PCR-based which I suspect is where the confusion lays.  The method described originally in this wiki article is the method used in Quikchange kit which is a modification of the Costa method.  It uses similar idea of copying the entire plasmid, then digest the template DNA with DpnI, however the Quikchange method is different in that the primers overlap (the Costa method specifically states that they should not), it doesn't use ligase which the Costa method does to generate a circular plasmid, and it is not a PCR reaction (if it is PCR you would get a linear DNA with repeated sequence at opposite ends which is not what you want). The Quikchange method itself was not published in a normal journal so most people can't check what it says, which is probably why they chose the closest method they can find and mistakenly used the wrong term.
 * I also just noticed that in one chapter in the book, the term double-stranded plasmid method is used as a general term which might fit the Quikchange method. Hzh (talk) 12:49, 26 December 2011 (UTC)