Published in

PeerJ, PeerJ, (7), p. e7228, 2019

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.7228

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Impact of metal oxide nanoparticles on in vitro DNA amplification

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Red circle
Preprint: archiving forbidden
Red circle
Postprint: archiving forbidden
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is used as an in vitro model system of DNA replication to assess the genotoxicity of nanoparticles (NPs). Prior results showed that several types of NPs inhibited PCR efficiency and increased amplicon error frequency. In this study, we examined the effects of various metal oxide NPs on inhibiting PCR, using high- vs. low-fidelity DNA polymerases; we also examined NP-induced DNA mutation bias at the single nucleotide level. The effects of seven major types of metal oxide NPs (Fe2O3, ZnO, CeO2, Fe3O4, Al2O3, CuO, and TiO2) on PCR replication via a low-fidelity DNA polymerase (Ex Taq) and a high-fidelity DNA polymerase (Phusion) were tested. The successfully amplified PCR products were subsequently sequenced using high-throughput amplicon sequencing. Using consistent proportions of NPs and DNA, we found that the effects of NPs on PCR yield differed depending on the DNA polymerase. Specifically, the efficiency of the high-fidelity DNA polymerase (Phusion) was significantly inhibited by NPs during PCR; such inhibition was not evident in reactions with Ex Taq. Amplicon sequencing showed that the overall error rate of NP-amended PCR was not significantly different from that of PCR without NPs (p > 0.05), and NPs did not introduce single nucleotide polymorphisms during PCR. Thus, overall, NPs inhibited PCR amplification in a DNA polymerase-specific manner, but mutations were not introduced in the process.