Localized In Situ Amplification (LISA): PCR Amplification of Nucleic Acid Sequences in Tissue Sections

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has revolutionized the manner in which molecular biologists are able to examine nucleic acids by offering an extremely sensitive mechanism for amplifying specific target sequences. The combination of increased sensitivity owing to the amplification process and increased specificity owing to primer sequences with subsequent analyses by DNA sequencing, restriction enzyme digestion, or probe hybridization has provided the most powerful molecular tool thus far for both the research and the clinical laboratory (1 ,2 ).