What is the function of DMSO in PCR?

Posted May 9, 2020

Answer

In PCR, addition of DMSO can enhance amplification. DMSO is commonly used to reduce secondary structures, which can pose a problem when working with templates that have high GC content. DMSO can also help relax supercoiled plasmids by increasing single-stranded regions, which allows enhanced topoisomerase I activity.

Additional resources

Lv, B., Dai, Y., Liu, J., Zhuge, Q., & Li, D. (2015). The effect of dimethyl sulfoxide on supercoiled DNA relaxation catalyzed by type I topoisomerases. BioMed research international, 2015.

Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)