Isothermal Amplification Methods
The newest generation of isothermal, amplification-based nucleic acid detection and quantification methods are primarily based on the rolling circle amplification technology, which has been around at least since the late 1990s (check Lizardi et al., 1998). As it turns out, generating circular molecules and amplifying those with a strand displacing polymerase creates huge concatemers (with many copies of the target loci for subsequent detection with eg., molecular beacons) that can be analyzed with a eg., fluorescence microscope and even counted, without having to rely on statistical approximations. Here I will describe some new, some old, isothermal amplification methods.