LMOs: treasure chest or Pandora's box?

PrimerZ (http://genepipe.ngc.sinica.edu.tw/primerz/) is a web application dedicated primarily to primer design for genes and human SNPs. PrimerZ accepts genes by gene name or Ensembl accession code, and SNPs by dbSNP rs or AFFY_Probe IDs. The promoter and exon sequence information of all gene transcripts fetched from the Ensembl database (http://www.ensembl.org/) are processed before being passed on to Primer3 (http://frodo.wi.mit. edu/cgi-bin/primer3/primer3_www.cgi) for individual primer design. All results returned from Primer 3 are organized and integrated in a specially designed web page for easy browsing. Besides the web page presentation, csv text file export is also provided for enhanced user convenience. PrimerZ automates highly standard but tedious gene primer design to improve the success rate of PCR experiments. More than 2000 primers have been designed with PrimerZ at our institute since 2004 and the success rate is over 70%. The addition of several new features has made PrimerZ even more useful to the research community in facilitating primer design for promoters, exons and SNPs.