You find a new gene involved in metabolizing plastics. You decide to search for

Question

You find a new gene involved in metabolizing plastics. You decide to search for other potential plastic metabolizing bacteria by using primers that amplify that sequence. When you perform PCR on your different sample sets from local landfills, you find that every sample is positive for the plastic degrading gene of interest. Unfortunately you also realize that you forgot a negative control, and are concerned you contaminated your samples. What would be an effective negative control?

No Buffer
No Sample
No polymerase
No dNTPs

Explanation / Answer

A negative control is a reaction in which you do not expect any amplification. So in this case, an effective negative control would be a PCR reaction without any sample, ie 'no sample'. Such a reaction would not give any amplification provided your water, buffer, primers, dNTPS and polymerase are not contaminated.

Alternatively, you could add a sample which you know has no plastic metabolizing gene. This would give no amplification.

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