title: The polymerase chain reaction and branching processes.
abstract: We construct a mathematical model for the polymerase chain reaction and its mutations using the theory of branching processes. Under this model we study the number of mutations in a randomly chosen sequence after n PCR cycles. A method for estimating the mutation is proposed and the variance of this estimator is studied. We also study the distribution of the Hamming distance between two randomly chosen sequences and a method for estimating the mutation rate based on pairwise differences is proposed.
mesh_terms: D001483:Base Sequence; D004247:DNA / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000235:genetics; D017931:DNA Primers; D003663:Decision Trees; D008433:Mathematics; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D016012:Poisson Distribution; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction
chemical_list: D017931:DNA Primers; D004247:DNA