What are the properties of Taq polymerase enzymes?

Taq polymerase is the most commonly used enzyme for PCR amplification. The most notable property of Taq polymerase enzyme that makes it the preferred enzyme for PCR amplification is that it is extremely heat resistant and stable at temperatures up to 95°C. This is the temperature at which DNA denatures, a critical first-step in a PCR reaction. Another important property of Taq polymerase enzyme is that it is most active in the 70 - 80°C temperature range. This is the ideal temperature range within which DNA won’t re-anneal and primers that have annealed at lower temperatures won’t peel off either. Thirdly, Taq polymerase enzyme leaves A-tailed products that can be cloned into a vector easily using a standard cloning kit. This makes it well suited for basic molecular biology. The fourth property of Taq is that it is comparatively resistant to DNA sequences with a wide range of GC contents and is not all overly selective about dNTP concentrations target DNA. All of these properties make Taq DNA polymerase integral to PCR amplifications.