yes and yes
A PCR is great for not letting a fragment slip by undetected at all. A PCR is worthless for assuming a fragment is from an active fresh viral infection this results in false positives, especially if amplified too much, but an unheard of low amount of false negatives
If marxists and socialists want to cripple a society with a near imaginary plague, they prefer tests with false positives.
I've just read about PCR and am trying to figure out how they determine whether it matches the DNA/RNA of interest. PCR seems to just be the part that makes lots of copies, though the primers seem a way to only multiply sequences that have those at the ends. Can they make longer primers to basically only match and multiply the sequence(s) of interest?
I'm also not grasping the electrophoresis step. Is that just to sort by length, and you just assume that a bunch of the proper length indicate that it's the one you multiplied? I see those pictures with the bands, are they basically a graph of the frequency of different lengths of DNA/RNA found?
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