Family-Specific Degenerate Primer Design: A Tool to Design Consensus Degenerated Oligonucleotides

Designing degenerate PCR primers for templates of unknown nucleotide sequence may be a very difficult task. In this paper, we present a new method to design degenerate primers, implemented in family-specific degenerate primer design (FAS-DPD) computer software, for which the starting point is a multiple alignment of related amino acids or nucleotide sequences. To assess their efficiency, four different genome collections were used, covering a wide range of genomic lengths: Arenavirus ( nucleotides), Baculovirus ( to ？bp), Lactobacillus sp. ( to ？bp), and Pseudomonas sp. ( to ？bp). In each case, FAS-DPD designed primers were tested computationally to measure specificity. Designed primers for Arenavirus and Baculovirus were tested experimentally. The method presented here is useful for designing degenerate primers on collections of related protein sequences, allowing detection of new family members. 1. Introduction The polymerase chain reaction (PCR), one of the most important analytical tools of molecular biology, allows a highly sensitive detection and specific genotyping of environmental samples, specially important in the metagenomic era [1]. A large list of genome typing applications includes arbitrarily primed PCR [2] (AP-PCR), random amplified primed DNAs [3] (RAPDs), PCR restriction fragment length polymorphism [4] (PCR-RFLP), and direct amplification of length polymorphism [5] (DALP). All of these techniques require a high quality and purity of the specific target template, because any available DNA could be substrate for the amplification step. In view of this, genotyping procedures of large genomes or complex samples are more reliable if they are based on DNA amplification using specific oligonucleotides. Therefore, primer design is crucial for efficient and successful amplification. Several primer design programs are available (e.g., OLIGO [6], OSP [7, 8], Primer Master [9], PRIDE [10], Primer3 [11], among others). Regardless of each computational working strategy, all of these use a set of common criteria (e.g., content, melting temperature, etc.) to evaluate the quality of primer candidates in a specific target region selected by the user. Alternative programs are aimed at more specific purposes, such as selection of primers that bind to conserved genomic regions based on multiple sequence alignments [12, 13], primer design for selective amplification of protein-coding regions [14], oligonucleotide design for site-directed mutagenesis [15], and primer design for hybridization [16]. Usually, the design of truly specific primers requires the