Primrose is a computer program for designing oligonucleotide probes and PCR primers. Although designed primarily to utilise small subunit ribosomal RNA sequence data, Primrose can be used to design probes and primers for any phylogenetically useful gene.
The following tutorial illustrates how Primrose can be used to identify potentially useful phylogenetic probes using data from the Ribosomal Database Project and other sources.
For this tutorial, we shall identify a 16S rDNA
probe that can target a novel uncultured taxon with the Bacteroidetes phylum.
Ideally, we require a probe that will target exclusively our novel
taxon to the exclusion of all other bacteria.
On running the program the we're presented with the following window: