Retrotransposon-based molecular markers are powerful molecular tools. However, these markers are not readily available due to the difficulty in obtaining species-specific retrotransposon primers. Although recent techniques enabling the rapid isolation of retrotransposon sequences have facilitated primer development, this process nonetheless remains time-consuming and costly. Therefore, research...

SUMMARY Amplicon is a program for designing PCR primers on aligned groups of DNA sequences. The most important application for Amplicon is the design of 'group-specific' PCR primer sets that amplify a DNA region from a given taxonomic group but do not amplify orthologous regions from other taxonomic groups. AVAILABILITY Amplicon is freely available as a script that will run on any platform wi...

MatK, the only maturase gene in the land plant plastid genome, is a very popular phylogenetic marker that has been extensively applied in reconstructing angiosperm phylogeny. However, the use of matK in fern phylogeny is largely unknown, due to difficulties with amplification: ferns have lost the flanking trnK exons, typically the region used for designing stable priming sites. We developed pri...

BACKGROUND Metagenetic analyses, which amplify and sequence target marker DNA regions from environmental samples, are increasingly employed to assess the biodiversity of communities of small organisms. Using this approach, our understanding of microbial diversity has expanded greatly. In contrast, only a few studies using this approach to characterize metazoan diversity have been reported, desp...

The Futures Lab was founded within the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory in the fall of 1994. The goal of the lab is develop new technology and systems to support collab-orative science. In order to meet this goal, the lab is organized around three research areas: advanced networking, multimedia, and virtual environments. The Argonne Computing and Communic...