Portable polymerease chain reaction system with thermoelectric cooling

In this work, we develop a portable polymerease chain reaction (PCR) device with thermoelectric cooling for fast PCR thermocycling process. The PCR system utilizes 60 W commercial thermoelectric modules (model Tianjin TEC1-12710), which allows fast heating and rapid cooling in the PCR temperature cycles. In addition, PID temperature control has been designed using microcontroller with computer interface. In this study, the system performance has been tested with DNA of shigella spp bacteria and the results are compared to those of commercial PCR system (Thermo cycle) by operating under the same PCR parameters including starting amount of DNA, the number of cycles, temperature and time in each PCR step. The tested results show that DNA amplification is successful with expected amount of amplified DNAs, which is comparable to those from the commercial PCR system.