Poly-primed amplification of nucleic acid sequences

A process for selectively amplifying nucleic acid sequences, comprising:

• (a) mixing at least one single stranded non-circular first-stage oligonucleotide primer (P1) and at least one single stranded first-stage amplification target circle (ATC1) to produce a primer-ATC sample mixture;
• (b) incubating said primer-ATC1 sample mixture under conditions that promote hybridization between the oligonucleotide primer (P) and the amplification target circle (ATC1) to form a hybridized primer-ATC1 sample mixture and allowing sufficient time to pass for hybridized primer-ATC1 complexes to form;
• (c) mixing a DNA polymerase and at least two deoxynucleotide triphosphates with said hybridized primer-ATC1 sample mixture to produce a polymerase-primer-ATC1 sample mixture and incubating the polymerase-primer-ATC1 mixture under conditions that promote replication of the a circles to form a primary tandem sequence DNA (TS-DNA);
• (d) adding to said polymerase-primer-ATC1 mixture at least one second-stage primer oligonucleotide (P2) comprising a first portion, or segment, having a sequence complementary to one or more sequences present in said primary TSDNA and a second portion, including a 3′-OH end, having a sequence not complementary to said primary TS-DNA, under conditions promoting hybridization of said first portion of P2 to said primary TS-DNA thereby forming a TS-DNA-P2 complex;
• (e) adding one or more second-stage amplification target circles (ATC2) to the mixture in (d) under conditions promoting hybridization of said ATC2 to said second portion of P2 to form a tandem sequence-P2-ATC2 mixture, wherein replication of the amplification target circles of (e) results in formation of secondary tandem sequence DNA.