LAMP is an isothermal nucleic acid amplification technique. In contrast to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology in which the reaction is carried out with a series of alternating temperature steps or cycles, isothermal amplification is carried out at a constant temperature, and does not require a thermal cycler.
In LAMP, the target sequence is amplified at a constant temperature of 60 - 65 °C using either two or three sets of primers and a polymerase with high strand displacement activity in addition to a replication activity. Typically, 4 different primers are used to identify 6 distinct regions on the target gene, which adds highly to the specificity. An additional pair of "loop primers" can further accelerate the reaction.[3] Due to the specific nature of the action of these primers, the amount of DNA produced in LAMP is considerably higher than PCR based amplification.