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Taq polymerase is an enzyme that is used by scientists in the polymerase chain reaction because it is stable at high temperatures. It is the polymerase used by a bacteria, Thermus auquatics, which... Taq polymerase is an enzyme that is used by scientists in the polymerase chain reaction because it is stable at high temperatures. Large amounts of a sample of DNA are necessary for molecular and genetic analyses, and the polymerase chain reaction is used to amplify very small amounts of DNA.
Therefore it replaced the DNA polymerase from E. coli originally used in PCR [7]. Taq's temperature optimum for activity is 75-80 0 C, with a half-life of 9 minutes at 97.5 0 C, and can replicate a 10 3 base pair strand of DNA in less than 10 seconds at 72 0 C [8].The incorporation of dNTPs into DNA is catalyzed by Taq DNA polymerase I.aq DNA polymerase has among the highest error rates of the thermophilic polymerases at 285 x 10 -6 errors per template nucleotide. Tli polymerase has a proof reading ability that is five-fold better than Taq at 57 x 10 -6 errors per template nucleotide and Pfu polymerase also demonstrates fidelity in this range [10].