5-Methyldeoxycytidine enhances the substrate activity of DNA polymerase

Here, we first demonstrated that 5-MedCTP could be incorporated into the synthetic DNA template by the exonuclease deficient Klenow fragment with a much higher efficiency than dCTP and 5-hydroxymethyl-dCTP. Further, we first conducted a comparable study of primer extension reaction using templates containing deoxycytidine (dC) or 5-methyldeoxycytidine (5-mdC) for incorporating different triphosphates. Based on our findings, 5-methyldeoxycytidine could enhance the substrate activity of the Klenow fragment (exo-) and this feature could potentially be used in DNA methylation analysis.