title: MEDUSA: large scale automatic selection and visual assessment of PCR primer pairs.
abstract: MEDUSA is a tool for automatic selection and visual assessment of PCR primer pairs, developed to assist large scale gene expression analysis projects. The system allows specification of constraints of the location and distances between the primers in a pair. For instance, primers in coding, non-coding, exon/intron-spanning regions might be selected. Medusa applies these constraints as a filter to primers predicted by three external programs, and displays the resulting primer pairs graphically in the Blixem (Sonnhammer and Durbin, COMPUT: Appl. Biosci. 10, 301-307, 1994; http://www.cgr.ki.se/cgr/groups/sonnhammer/Blixem.html) viewer.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  The MEDUSA web server is available at http://www.cgr.ki.se/cgr/MEDUSA. The source code and user information are available at ftp://ftp.cgr.ki.se/pub/prog/medusa.
authors.affiliation: Center for Genomics Research, Karolinska Institutet, S-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden.
authors.forename: R M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Podowski
authors.forename: E L
authors.initials: EL
authors.lastname: Sonnhammer
mesh_terms: D001483:Base Sequence; D019295:Computational Biology; D017931:DNA Primers / Q000235:genetics; D023281:Genomics; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D017931:DNA Primers