PSC:A system for PCR primer specificity checking and application

Polymerase Chain Reaction(PCR)is widely used in biological research.The non-specific products obtained in PCR seriously interfere the efficiency of routine PCR experiments and especially multiplex PCR reactions because of cross hybridization.However,none efficient programs for primer specificity evaluation and are available till now.In order to avoid obtaining the non-specific amplicons in PCR experiment,we built a web-based tool PSC(Primer Specificity Checking,http://biocompute.bmi.ac.cn/PSC)to improve the accuracy of PCR by checking the match of the primers to DNA templates based on NCBI-Blast program.Databases of multiple species have been provided for primer specificity checking and also the optimal parameter of word size is suggested for evaluation after testing various of primer pairs based on different species.Focusing on predictiion of the possible non-specific amplicons,PSC can be used to optimize primer design or analyze the unexpected PCR results to improve the PCR efficiency.