Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) consists of three primary steps performed in a thermal cycler: Denaturation, Annealing, and Extension.
During the annealing step, the temperature is lowered (typically to 50-65°C), which allows the short synthetic oligonucleotide primers to form hydrogen bonds with their complementary sequences on the single-stranded DNA templates.
Denaturation involves separating DNA strands at high heat. Extension involves the DNA polymerase adding nucleotides. Ligation is a separate process in recombinant DNA technology, not a step of PCR. Therefore, primer binding occurs exclusively during annealing.
Final Answer: annealing
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