Fitting with this model, studies have shown a possible correlation between the DNA polymerase subunit content of bacterial genomes and their GC-content (Wu et al. 2014).
Nevertheless, most viral proteomes are reported as 'translated sequences' with a very poor annotation of their content (polymerase and envelope proteins being the exception).
Therefore, we think that the correlation between dnaE polymerases and GC content is a rule rather than coincidental and exceptional, albeit lacking direct experimental confirmation.
Prior to FISH analysis, the BAC clones were verified for gene content by Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplification.
Hence it is possible that the association between alpha polymerase subunits and GC content is coincidental, established by a few coincidental evolutionary changes; for example, it might be that the evolution of the dnaE2 subunit happened at the same as another unrelated evolutionary change which caused a shift towards high genomic GC content.
Fractions were then analyzed for Ad5 genome content by quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR).
The authors correlated this feature to the temperature of the enzymatic reaction (68 to 72°C for the Taq Polymerase) and to the GC content of their plant genome.
In this subset, we also measured telomeric DNA content by quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) analysis, which strictly quantifies telomere repeats.
Once they have set the problem within a proper comparative framework they can start to investigate the relative correlation between GC content and alpha polymerase subunits, genome size, lifestyle....etc....etc
This algorithm strongly improves the signal-to-noise ratios of the copy-number data by (1) accounting for the length and GC content of the polymerase chain reaction products using quadratic regressions and by (2) normalizing the patient samples to reference samples run in parallel.
