By the way, PCR is really quite a popular thing today. Right? Polymerase chain reaction, particularly in our legal system, is used as a means of identifying whether or not people are, or are not, present at a scene of a crime. The enzyme that's used in the PCR reaction was obtained from a thermophile. By the way, you wouldn't see the following discussed on the evening news. To start the reaction you have to separate the two strands of DNA into single strands by the use of heat. Then the enzyme will polymerize the reaction and you go from two strands to four strands, four strands to eight strands, so forth and on in progression. But each time you replicate the strands, the strands that are made wind around each other. In order to continue the process, you have to heat the system up again and separate the strands. So having an enzyme that was tolerant of heat, one from a thermophile, was a tremendous addition to the whole PCR process.

By the way, since I've mentioned PCR, not only do we identify the criminals within our system as a fingerprint, but we use it as an identification tool for microorganisms, too. Right now, for instance, there is some connection with Chlamydia, Chlamydia pneumoniae and atherosclerosis. You might see this topic in the Pfizer exhibit. In fact, the association of C. pneumoniae with atherosclerosis is in observations that the organism is associated with build up of plaque in arteries. These creatures are very difficult to grow. So rather than trying to isolate and probably missing recovery of the organism, we can use PCR methods for detection and so we can identify that the organisms are indeed there. There is some degree of quantitation possible with PCR data; the intensity of the bands developed by PCR can provide some estimate of the number of Chlamydia present. Hopefully, that will be helpful in sorting that out the significance of Chlamydia in atherosclerosis.

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