Twisted Intercalating Nucleic Acid (TINA) – a novel group of molecules with improved performance in PCR and qPCR applications

Rainer Schubbert Eurofins Medigenomix, Germany

Abstract

The recently developed TINA molecule (Twisted Intercalating Nucleic Acid) from QuantiBact A/S enhances the thermal stability of a binding oligonucleotide duplex while leaving the ability to discriminate matching and mismatching oligonucleotides intact. TINA labeling increases the primer annealing and melting temperature and therefore reduces the general probability of PCR primers to anneal unspecific.
This increase in specific primer annealing can be utilized to increase the overall specificity of a given assay. Alternatively, by “relaxing” the stringency of the primer annealing, an increased sensitivity can be achieved without compromising specificity compared to an identical assay without TINA-modifications.
We present examples from routine analyses (food authenticity, residual DNA, pathogen detection), where we have validated whether TINA modified oligos allows better discrimination in allele specific PCR and RealTime PCR assays or higher sensitivity in RealTime PCR assays compared to analyses with unmodified oligos.