PCR Primer Design of Medicilon

A melting temperature (Tm) in the range of 50 C to 65 C

Absence of dimerization capability

Absence of significant hairpin formation (>3 bp)

Lack of secondary priming sites

Low to moderate specific binding at the 3′ end (avoid high GC content to prevent mispriming)

1. Primer Length: It is generally accepted that the optimal length of PCR primers is 18-22bp. This length is long enough for adequate specificity, and short enough for primers to bind easily to the template at the annealing temperature.

2. Melting Temperature: Melting Temperature (Tm) by definition is the temperature at which one half of the DNA duplex will dissociate to become single stranded and indicates the duplex stability. Primers with melting temperatures in the range of 52-58℃ generally produce the best results. Primers with melting temperatures above 65℃ have a tendency for secondary annealing. The GC content of the sequence gives a fair indication of the Tm. All our products calculate it using the nearest neighbor thermodynamic theory, accepted as a much superior method for estimating it, which is considered the most recent and best available.

3. Primer Annealing Temperature: The primer melting temperature is the estimate of the DNA-DNA hybrid stability and critical in determining the annealing temperature. Too high Ta will produce insufficient primer-template hybridization resulting in low PCR product yield. Too low Ta may possibly lead to non-specific products caused by a high number of base pair mismatches,. Mismatch tolerance is found to have the strongest influence on PCR specificity.

4. GC Content: The GC content (the number of G’s and C’s in the primer as a percentage of the total bases) of primer should be 40-60%.

5. GC Clamp: The presence of G or C bases within the last five bases from the 3′ end of primers (GC clamp) helps promote specific binding at the 3′ end due to the stronger bonding of G and C bases. More than 3 G’s or C’s should be avoided in the last 5 bases at the 3′ end of the primer.

6. Secondary Structures: Presence of the secondary structures produced by intermolecular or intramolecular interactions can lead to poor or no yield of the product. They adversely affect primer template annealing and thus the amplification. They greatly reduce the availability of primers to the reaction.

7. Repeats: A repeat is a di-nucleotide occurring many times consecutively and should be avoided because they can misprime. For example: ATATATAT. A maximum number of di-nucleotide repeats acceptable is 4 di-nucleotides.

8. Runs: Primers with long runs of a single base should generally be avoided as they can misprime. For example, AGCGGGGGATGGGG has runs of base ‘G’ of value 5 and 4. A maximum number of runs accepted is 4bp.

9. 3′ End Stability: It is the maximum ΔG value of the five bases from the 3′ end. An unstable 3′ end (less negative ΔG) will result in less false priming.

10. Avoid Template Secondary Structure: A single stranded Nucleic acid sequences is highly unstable and fold into conformations (secondary structures). The stability of these template secondary structures depends largely on their free energy and melting temperatures(Tm). Consideration of template secondary structures is important in designing primers, especially in qPCR. If primers are designed on a secondary structures which is stable even above the annealing temperatures, the primers are unable to bind to the template and the yield of PCR product is significantly affected. Hence, it is important to design primers in the regions of the templates that do not form stable secondary structures during the PCR reaction. Our products determine the secondary structures of the template using the M fold algorithm and design primers avoiding them.

11. Avoid Cross Homology: To improve specificity of the primers it is necessary to avoid regions of homology. Primers designed for a sequence must not amplify other genes in the mixture. Commonly, primers are designed and then BLASTed to test the specificity. Our products offer a better alternative. You can avoid regions of cross homology while designing primers. You can BLAST the templates against the appropriate non-redundant database and the software will interpret the results. It will identify regions significant cross homologies in each template and avoid them during primer search.

1. Amplicon Length : The amplicon length is dictated by the experimental goals. For qPCR, the target length is closer to 100bp and for standard PCR, it is near 500 bp. If you know the positions of each primer with respect to the template, the product is calculated as: Product length = (Position of antisense primer-Position of sense primer) +1.

2. Product Position : Primer can be located near the 5′ end, the 3′ end or any where within specified length. Generally, the sequence close to the 3′ end is known with greater confidence and hence preferred most frequently.

3. Tm of Product : Melting Temperature (Tm) is the temperature at which one half of the DNA duplex will dissociate and become single stranded. The stability of the primer-template DNA duplex can be measured by the melting temperature(Tm).

4. Optimum Annealing Temperature (Ta Opt): The formula of Rychlik is most respected. Our products use this formula to calculate it and thousands of our customers have reported good results using it for the annealing step of the PCR cycle.It usually results in good PCR product yield with minimum false product production.

5. Primer Pair Tm Mismatch Calculation : The two primers of a primer pair should have closely matched melting temperatures for maximizing PCR product yield. The difference of 5℃ or more can lead no amplification.