Forced intercalation probes (FIT-probes) are nucleic acid probes, in which an intercalator cyanine dye such as thiazole orange (TO) serves as a replacement of a canonical nucleobase. These probes signal hybridization by showing strong increases of fluorescence. TO in FIT-probes responds to adjacent base mismatches by attenuation of fluorescence intensities at conditions where both matched and mismatched target DNA ...