Why in News?

• A team of scientists at Stanford University and the National Centre for Biological Sciences at India’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research have developed a method for extracting genetic information.

Highlights:

• The new method is faster and cheap and collects information from degraded and left-behind materials, such as feces, skin or saliva, and from food products suspected of containing endangered animals.
• It will help wildlife conservationists aiming to protect endangered species, but they were unable to collect the DNA samples from rare and elusive animals.
• The new method relies on identifying multiple, short portions of DNA segments in a single experiment (a multiplex PCR), followed by ‘next-generation sequencing’, in which multiple fragments of DNA can be decoded simultaneously, and several times, in an automated process.

Multiplex PCR:

• Multiplex polymerase chain reaction refers to the use of polymerase chain reaction to amplify several different DNA sequences simultaneously.