25 lines
1.1 KiB
Plaintext
25 lines
1.1 KiB
Plaintext
Primer3 is a widely used program for designing PCR primers (PCR =
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"Polymerase Chain Reaction"). PCR is an essential and ubiquitous tool
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in genetics and molecular biology. Primer3 can also design
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hybridization probes and sequencing primers.
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Primer3 picks primers for PCR reactions, considering as criteria: o
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- oligonucleotide melting temperature, size, GC content, and
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primer-dimer possibilities,
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- PCR product size,
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- positional constraints within the source (template) sequence,
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- possibilities for ectopic priming (amplifying the wrong sequence), and
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- many other constraints.
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All of these criteria are user-specifiable as constraints, and some
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are specifiable as terms in an objective function that characterizes
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an optimal primer pair.
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Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research provides a basic web-based
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front end to primer3 named primer3web at http://fokker.wi.mit.edu/
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Wageningen University Laboratory of Bioinformatics provides a enhanced
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web-based front end to primer3 named primer3plus at
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http://www.bioinformatics.nl/cgi-bin/primer3plus/primer3plus.cgi
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