SNP detection in Highly Degraded DNA

Project Summary for 2002-IJ-CX-K005 The assay that will be developed focuses on the detection of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) using ligase-mediated gene detection to generate a signal which is subsequently amplified by the polymerase chain reaction. Many thousands of SNPs are present in the human nuclear as well as the mitochondrial DNA genomes. Ligase-mediated gene detection is based on existing DNA technologies connected in a novel manner designed to analyze DNA fragments that are too small to be successfully typed using traditional methods. This alternate method should be able to detect very small amounts of DNA as well as degraded DNA, and has the additional advantage of being able to type several SNPs simultaneously (i.e., multiplexing). ca/ncf