Restriction digest

In molecular biology, a restriction digest is a procedure used to prepare DNA for analysis or other processing. It is sometimes termed DNA fragmentation, though this term is used for other procedures as well. In a restriction digest, DNA molecules are cleaved at specific regions of 4-12 nucleotides in length (restriction sites) by use of restriction enzymes which recognize these sequences.

The resulting digested DNA is very often selectively amplified using polymerase chain reaction (PCR), making it more suitable for analytical techniques such as agarose gel electrophoresis, and chromatography. It is used in genetic fingerprinting, plasmid subcloning, and RFLP analysis.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.