PrimerBank: a resource of human and mouse PCR primer pairs for gene expression detection and quantification

PrimerBank (http://pga. mgh. harvard. edu/primer bank/) is a public resource for the retrieval of human and mouse primer pairs for gene expression analysis by PCR and Quantitative PCR (QPCR). A total of 306 800 primers covering most known human and mouse genes can be accessed from the PrimerBank database, together with information on these primers such as T-m, location on the transcript and amplicon size. For each gene, at least one primer pair has been designed and in many cases alternative primer pairs exist. Primers have been designed to work under the same PCR conditions, thus facilitating high- throughput QPCR. There are several ways to search for primers for the gene(s) of interest, such as by: GenBank accession number, NCBI protein accession number, NCBI gene ID, PrimerBank ID, NCBI gene symbol or gene description (keyword). In all, 26 855 primer pairs covering most known mouse genes have been experimentally validated by QPCR, agarose gel analysis, sequencing and BLAST, and all validation data can be freely accessed from the PrimerBank web site.