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BOND: Basic OligoNucleotide Design.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: DNA microarrays have become ubiquitous in biological and medical research. The most difficult problem that needs to be solved is the design of DNA oligonucleotides that (i) are highly specific, that is, bind only to the intended target, (ii) cover the highest possible number of genes, that is, all genes that allow such unique regions, and (iii) are computed fast. None of the existing programs meet all these criteria. RESULTS: We introduce a new approach with our software program BOND (Basic OligoNucleotide Design). According to Kane's criteria for oligo design, BOND computes highly specific DNA oligonucleotides, for all the genes that admit unique probes, while running orders of magnitude faster than the existing programs. The same approach enables us to introduce also an evaluation procedure that correctly measures the quality of the oligonucleotides. Extensive comparison is performed to prove our claims. BOND is flexible, easy to use, requires no additional software, and is freely available for non-commercial use from http://www.csd.uwo.ca/?ilie/BOND/. CONCLUSIONS: We provide an improved solution to the important problem of oligonucleotide design, including a thorough evaluation of oligo design programs. We hope BOND will become a useful tool for researchers in biological and medical sciences by making the microarray procedures faster and more accurate.

SUBMITTER: Ilie L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3648450 | biostudies-other | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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BOND: Basic OligoNucleotide Design.

Ilie Lucian L Mohamadi Hamid H Golding Geoffrey Brian GB Smyth William F WF

BMC bioinformatics 20130227

<h4>Background</h4>DNA microarrays have become ubiquitous in biological and medical research. The most difficult problem that needs to be solved is the design of DNA oligonucleotides that (i) are highly specific, that is, bind only to the intended target, (ii) cover the highest possible number of genes, that is, all genes that allow such unique regions, and (iii) are computed fast. None of the existing programs meet all these criteria.<h4>Results</h4>We introduce a new approach with our software ...[more]

PMID: 23444904

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Project description:Many environmental and biomedical biomonitoring and detection studies aim to explore the presence of specific organisms or gene functionalities in microbiome samples. In such cases, when the study hypotheses can be answered with the exploration of a small number of genes, a targeted PCR-approach is appropriate. However, due to the complexity of environmental microbial communities, the design of specific primers is challenging and can lead to non-specific results. We designed PhyloPrimer, the first user-friendly platform to semi-automate the design of taxon-specific oligos (i.e., PCR primers) for a gene of interest. The main strength of PhyloPrimer is the ability to retrieve and align GenBank gene sequences matching the user's input, and to explore their relationships through an online dynamic tree. PhyloPrimer then designs oligos specific to the gene sequences selected from the tree and uses the tree non-selected sequences to look for and maximize oligo differences between targeted and non-targeted sequences, therefore increasing oligo taxon-specificity (positive/negative consensus approach). Designed oligos are then checked for the presence of secondary structure with the nearest-neighbor (NN) calculation and the presence of off-target matches with in silico PCR tests, also processing oligos with degenerate bases. Whilst the main function of PhyloPrimer is the design of taxon-specific oligos (down to the species level), the software can also be used for designing oligos to target a gene without any taxonomic specificity, for designing oligos from preselected sequences and for checking predesigned oligos. We validated the pipeline on four commercially available microbial mock communities using PhyloPrimer to design genus- and species-specific primers for the detection of Streptococcus species in the mock communities. The software performed well on these mock microbial communities and can be found at https://www.cerealsdb.uk.net/cerealgenomics/phyloprimer.

Project description:BACKGROUND: Microarray comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) is currently one of the most powerful techniques to measure DNA copy number in large genomes. In humans, microarray CGH is widely used to assess copy number variants in healthy individuals and copy number aberrations associated with various diseases, syndromes and disease susceptibility. In model organisms such as Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) the technique has been applied to detect mutations, primarily deletions, in strains of interest. Although various constraints on oligonucleotide properties have been suggested to minimize non-specific hybridization and improve the data quality, there have been few experimental validations for CGH experiments. For genomic regions where strict design filters would limit the coverage it would also be useful to quantify the expected loss in data quality associated with relaxed design criteria. RESULTS: We have quantified the effects of filtering various oligonucleotide properties by measuring the resolving power for detecting deletions in the human and C. elegans genomes using NimbleGen microarrays. Approximately twice as many oligonucleotides are typically required to be affected by a deletion in human DNA samples in order to achieve the same statistical confidence as one would observe for a deletion in C. elegans. Surprisingly, the ability to detect deletions strongly depends on the oligonucleotide 15-mer count, which is defined as the sum of the genomic frequency of all the constituent 15-mers within the oligonucleotide. A similarity level above 80% to non-target sequences over the length of the probe produces significant cross-hybridization. We recommend the use of a fairly large melting temperature window of up to 10 C, the elimination of repeat sequences, the elimination of homopolymers longer than 5 nucleotides, and a threshold of -1 kcal/mol on the oligonucleotide self-folding energy. We observed very little difference in data quality when varying the oligonucleotide length between 50 and 70, and even when using an isothermal design strategy. CONCLUSIONS: We have determined experimentally the effects of varying several key oligonucleotide microarray design criteria for detection of deletions in C. elegans and humans with NimbleGen's CGH technology. Our oligonucleotide design recommendations should be applicable for CGH analysis in most species.

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BOND: Basic OligoNucleotide Design.

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BOND: Basic OligoNucleotide Design.

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