Mutagenic primer design for mismatch PCR-RFLP SNP genotyping using a genetic algorithm

IEEE/ACM Trans Comput Biol Bioinform. 2012 May-Jun;9(3):837-45. doi: 10.1109/TCBB.2012.25.

Abstract

Polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) is useful in small-scale basic research studies of complex genetic diseases that are associated with single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). Designing a feasible primer pair is an important work before performing PCR-RFLP for SNP genotyping. However, in many cases, restriction enzymes to discriminate the target SNP resulting in the primer design is not applicable. A mutagenic primer is introduced to solve this problem. GA-based Mismatch PCR-RFLP Primers Design (GAMPD) provides a method that uses a genetic algorithm to search for optimal mutagenic primers and available restriction enzymes from REBASE. In order to improve the efficiency of the proposed method, a mutagenic matrix is employed to judge whether a hypothetical mutagenic primer can discriminate the target SNP by digestion with available restriction enzymes. The available restriction enzymes for the target SNP are mined by the updated core of SNP-RFLPing. GAMPD has been used to simulate the SNPs in the human SLC6A4 gene under different parameter settings and compared with SNP Cutter for mismatch PCR-RFLP primer design. The in silico simulation of the proposed GAMPD program showed that it designs mismatch PCR-RFLP primers. The GAMPD program is implemented in JAVA and is freely available at http://bio.kuas.edu.tw/gampd/.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Base Pair Mismatch
  • DNA Primers / chemistry*
  • Genotype*
  • Humans
  • Mutation*
  • Polymerase Chain Reaction / methods
  • Polymorphism, Restriction Fragment Length / genetics*
  • Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide*

Substances

  • DNA Primers