doi:10.1155/2012/783138 Research Article Gemi: PCR Primers Prediction from Multiple Alignments

Copyright © 2012 H. Sobhy and P. Colson. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Designing primers and probes for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a preliminary and critical step that requires the identification of highly conserved regions in a given set of sequences. This task can be challenging if the targeted sequences display a high level of diversity, as frequently encountered in microbiologic studies. We developed Gemi, an automated, fast, and easy-to-use bioinformatics tool with a user-friendly interface to design primers and probes based on multiple aligned sequences. This tool can be used for the purpose of real-time and conventional PCR and can deal efficiently with large sets of sequences of a large size. 1