When different concentrations of ssRNA and ssDNA were extended by TdT (
Figs. 2A–
C), it is clear that with a higher concentration of primers, fluorescence intensity became stronger with a wider size distribution of polymerization products. All unextended primers have migrated out of the electrophoretic lane, and the counted fluorescence intensity represents the fluorescence intensity of the extended primers,
i.e. the whole lane. A near-perfect linear trend was observed for the plot of fluorescence intensity with the concentration of nucleic acid (
Fig. 2B). The slope for RNA primers is lower than for DNA primers, indicating that the catalytic efficiency of TCER was poorer than TCED. The fluorescence intensity was correlated with the concentrations of ssDNA and ssRNA, enabling us to quantitatively analyze Cy5 and Cy3 fluorescence intensity, and standard curves of different concentrations of ssRNA and ssDNA with fluorescence intensity were fitted (Fig. S4 in Supporting Information). Through calculation (detail method is shown in Supporting information and data are shown in Figs. S5 and S6 in Supporting Information), it is concluded that when the concentration of ssDNA or ssRNA increased, the percentage of extended primers in the reaction decreased: the case for ssRNA decreased sharply from around 47% to 12%; while in the case of ssDNA, the deduction is limited with more than about 85% of extended primers in the reaction (
Fig. 2C). Furthermore, when the amount of enzyme in the reaction system was increased to 10 folds, the proportion of extended ssRNA in the reaction was not significantly increased, suggesting that ssDNA is more easily captured by TdT (Fig. S7 in Supporting information). From
Fig. 2A and Fig. S6, it is interesting to find out that the extension products of ssRNA were concentrated at the upper part of the lane no matter with a high or low concentration of ssRNA primers, indicating that once ssRNA was captured by TdT and extended to form chimeric RNA-DNA, which may continue to be extended easily by TdT. This was more probable to be captured by TdT again than ssRNA itself, which may be due to its cellular function as a DNA polymerase [
50]. If we looked more detailly at the molecular weight (MW) of the reaction products, it is found that the products of TCER stick to the high MW part (> 1200 bp), and gradually extend to the lower MW part as more ssRNA primers are available (Fig. S6C). In the case of ssDNA primers, as the concentration of primers increased, the products were more evenly distributed on the lane (
Fig. 2A and Fig. S6D). When the concentration of primers is low, the polymerization product prefers a large MW (> 1200 bp) product. With ssDNA higher than 5 × 10
−7 mol/L, products were concentrated on the "100–500 bp" or "500–1200 bp" parts, consistent with previous reports [
43]. Therefore, TCER could effectively solve the problem that current methods are difficult to produce long-chain nucleic acids and generate products with high molecular weight, which can be used in synthetic biology or to produce DNA tails to protect RNA from deterioration [
51].