Plasmid Sequencing

A plasmid is a small, circular extrachromosomal piece of DNA in bacteria. Plasmids can be isolated and engineered to express a gene of interest (1-20kb in size) in large quantities, and are often used to confer antibiotic resistance. Plasmid sequencing is therefore a common molecular biology technique used to find out the sequence of a gene of interest and its possible mutations in a vector plasmid. The customer must decide which forward and reverse primers can be used for sequencing. These primers can either be designed by the user or asked by sequencing cores to use common primers. (Credit: Noushin Nabavi)