MEDUSA: large scale automatic selection anti visual assessment of PCR primer pairs

MEDUSA is a tool for automatic selection and visual assessment of PCR prime r pairs, developed to assist large scale gene expression analysis projects. The system allows specification of constraints of the location and distanc es between the primers in a pair. For instance, primers in coding, non-codi ng, exon/intron-spanning regions might be selected. Medusa applies these co nstraints as a filter to primers predicted by three external programs, and displays the resulting primer pairs graphically in the Blixem (Sonnhammer a nd Durbin, Comput, Appl. Biosci. 10, 301-307, 1994; http://www.cgr.ki.se/cg r/groups/sonnhammer/Blixem.html) viewer.