A computer program for the design of optimal synthetic oligonucleotide probes for protein coding genes.

A computer program has been written in FORTRAN 77 to locate on a protein sequence a region with optimum length and limited degeneracy in order to design artificial oligonucleotide probes for use in molecular cloning. In addition the program checks for regions of homology between this probe and any other base sequence found in nucleotide sequence data banks. There are options in the program to eliminate rare codons or to make preferential choices of bases in order to minimize the degeneracy of probes.