To detect five plant viruses (Beet black scorch virus, Beet necrotic yellow vein virus, Eggplant mottled dwarf virus, Pelargonium zonate spot virus, and Rice yellow mottle virus) for quarantine purposes, we designed 15 RT-PCR primer sets. Primer design was based on the nucleotide sequence of the coat protein gene, which is highly conserved within species. All but one primer set successfully amp...

SUMMARY We have developed U-PRIMER, a primer design program, to compute a minimal primer set (MPS) for any given set of DNA sequences. The U-PRIMER algorithm, which uses automatic variable fixing and automatic redundant constraint elimination to tackle the binary integer programming problem associated with the MPS selection problem. The program has been tested successfully with 32 adipocyte dev...

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a basic molecular biology technique with a multiplicity of uses, including deoxyribonucleic acid cloning and sequencing, functional analysis of genes, diagnosis of diseases, genotyping and discovery of genetic variants. Reliable primer design is crucial for successful PCR, and for over a decade, the open-source Primer3 software has been widely used for primer ...

We have developed PRIDE, a primer design program that automatically designs primers in single contigs or whole sequencing projects to extend the already known sequence and to double strand single-stranded regions. The program is fully integrated into the Staden package (GAP4) and accessible with a graphical user interface. PRIDE uses a fuzzy logic-based system to calculate primer qualities. The...

Gamification gradually gains more attention. However, gamification and its successful application is still unclear. There is a lack of insights and theory on the relationships between game design elements, motivation, domain context and user behavior. We want to discover the potentials of data-driven optimization of gamification design, e.g. by the application of machine learning techniques on ...

There is a large amount of research currently being done on autonomous micro-aerial vehicles (MAV), such as quadrotor helicopters or quadcopters. The ability to create a working autonomous MAV depends mainly on integrating a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) solution with the rest of the system. This paper provides an introduction for creating an autonomous MAV for enclosed environme...

Their large size and their relative resistance to proteolytic cleavage (1) make myosins particularly difficult substrates for the acquisition of their peptide sequences by standard protocols. For this reason, instead of identifying myosins first according to their biochemical activity and then obtaining their sequences, PCR and other DNA-based techniques exploiting the highly conserved sequence...

1Division of AIDS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892; ZDepartment of Molecular Biology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63110; 3Department of Pathology, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland 20814 PCR is a technology born of the modern molecular biology era. The enzyme used...

The design of PCR or DNA Chip experiments is a time consuming process where bioinformatics is extensively used. The selection of the primers, which are immobilized on the DNA chip, requires a complex algorithm. Based on several parameters an optimized set of primers is automatically detected for a given gene sequence. This paper describes a parallel architecture which performs the optimization ...

Screening for mutations in human disease-causing genes in a molecular diagnostic environment demands simplicity with a view to allowing high throughput approaches. In order to advance these requirements, we have developed and applied a primer design program, termed BatchPD, to achieve the PCR amplification of coding exons of all known human Refseq genes. Primer design, in silico PCR checks and ...