Improvement of PCR reaction conditions for site-directed mutagenesis of big plasmids.

QuickChange mutagenesis is the method of choice for site-directed mutagenesis (SDM) of target sequences in a plasmid. It can be applied successfully to small plasmids (up to 10 kb). However, this method cannot efficiently mutate bigger plasmids. Using KOD Hot Start polymerase in combination with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) purified primers, we were able to achieve SDM in big plasmids (up to 16 kb) involving not only a single base change but also multiple base changes. Moreover, only six polymerase chain reaction (PCR) cycles and 0.5 µl of polymerase (instead of 18 PCR cycles and 1.0 µl of enzyme in the standard protocol) were sufficient for the reaction.