How can you clone a plasmid by PCR? In a living cell?

Answer 1

You could produce large amounts of sections of the plasmid by standard PCR or perhaps all of it by long PCR if you're lucky. but to clone it you will have to extract the plamid (kits for plasmid isolation and purification are available) and put it in to another bacteria and grow it up.

Answer 2

Some companies make specialized thermophilic polymerases which can amplify DNA up to 20 kb. Why you would do such a thing to amplify an entire plasmid I do not know, as the easiest method is to just grow more bacteria and isolate plasmid from them.

Living cells are just plasmid factories in that sense.

If you are asking about whole-cell pcr, where your template is boiled or microwaved bacteria, my guess is that with the specific conditions that the polymerases require you would have a rather difficult time getting the amplification to work for a long distance.

Answer 3

you can't

PCR is for small chains of DNA - not a whole plasmid

what you are thinking of is transvecting the plasmid into a cell (bacteria) and then growing a culture to replicate the plasmid.