Thorough understanding of the genetic development of the jaws can bring about new genetic insights about evolution. Some of these mutations can lead to the understanding of biological processes related in some way to the mutant gene. This study, in turn, can lead to a deeper understanding of genetic development of the jaw. Methods One way to map mutations is to calculate their genetic distance to genetic markers. They have different lengths which depend on the distance between the two binding sites that initiated their amplification.
Amplification consists of making several copies of a specific marker.
This process is achieved by incubating DNA with a primer, DNA polymerase and a mixture of free nucleotides. If two binding sites are separated by a distance of about 2000 bp or less, and are on opposite strands of a chromosome, the segment of DNA between these sites will be duplicated in each replication cycle. Consequently, every time a new replication cycle takes place, the number of copies of the marker increases exponentially, giving rise to an amplified genetic marker. Incubation is carried out in a PCR thermocontroller which induces DNA in the incubation reaction to undergo 37 replication cycles. After this process, there will be 237 copies of each amplified marker.