background: echinocuccus granulosus, the causative agent of cystic echinococcosis has long been recognized as having a high degree of genetic divergence. the strains characterization seems to be essential for the establishment of a preventive and control strategy in every endemic area. using dna based methods for strain /genotype characterizations of e. granulosus have some difficulties, especi...

Primer Design Assistant (PDA) is a web interface primer design service combined with thermodynamic theory to evaluate the fitness of primers. It runs in a Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP structure on a PC equipped with dual CPU (Intel Pentium III 1.4 GHz) and 512 Mb of RAM. A succinct user interface of PDA is accomplished by built-in parameters setting. Advanced options on 5' GC content, 3' GC content, ...

Primers are arguably the single most critical components of any PCR assay, as their properties control the exquisite specificity and sensitivity that make this method uniquely powerful. Consequently, poor design combined with failure to optimise reaction conditions is likely to result in reduced technical precision and false positive or negative detection of amplification targets. Despite the f...

MOTIVATION Primer design involves various parameters such as string-based alignment scores, melting temperature, primer length and GC content. This entails a design approach from multicriteria decision making. Values of some of the criteria are easy to compute while others require intense calculations. RESULTS The reference point method was found to be tractable for trading-off between deviat...

To provide feasible primer sets for performing a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) experiment, many primer design methods have been proposed. However, the majority of these methods require a relatively long time to obtain an optimal solution since large quantities of template DNA need to be analyzed. Furthermore, the designed primer sets usually do not provide a specific PCR product size. In rece...

To make PCR a specific, efficient and cost effective tool for researchers and clinicians the most important aspect is oligonucleotide primer design. This review discusses various aspects of primer design. Advice is provided for optimal design and the role of bioinformatic tools is highlighted. The authors discuss theoretical considerations and compare computational and experimental studies.