Premier Biosoft International has announced the world wide release of version 5 of AlleleID, the only tool available for designing diagnostic assays for both real time PCR and microarrays
AlleleID now includes support for designing custom probes for MLPA assays.
AlleleID will help MLPA users design custom oligos for genes that do not have kits available.
Multiplex Ligation-dependent Probe Amplification (MLPA) is a method to establish the copy number of up to 45 nucleic acid sequences in a single reaction.
MLPA probes are able to discriminate between sequences that differ by just one nucleotide, making them a highly sensitive and precise tool for detecting the changes.
Current efforts are directed towards more comprehensive catalogueing and characterization of such changes.
For design support, the company has teamed up with MRC-Holland, the inventors of MLPA technology.
"With this collaboration, both Premier Biosoft and MRC-Holland will use their core competencies and expertise to develop a powerful bioinformatics tool for MLPA users", commented Kay Brown, vp business development and marketing.
AlleleID is a comprehensive desktop tool designed to address the challenges of pathogen detection, bacterial identification or taxa/species discrimination using microarrays and TaqMan TaqMan MGB, SYBR Green and molecular beacon qPCR assays.
With ClustalW multiple sequence alignment at its core, AlleleID can design species specific/cross species probes for microarrays or TaqMan, TaqMan MGB, SYBR Green and molecular beacon qPCR assays.
AlleleID employs a sophisticated algorithm to assure assay success.
Highly specific oligos are designed by avoiding regions of significant homology found by automatically interpreting BLAST search results.
The oligos designed can be BLAST searched, to verify their specificity.
Primer efficiency is enhanced by automatically avoiding template secondary structures.
