Automation of a primer design and evaluation pipeline for subsequent sequencing of the coding regions of all human Refseq genes

Screening for mutations in human disease-causing genes in a molecular diagnostic environment demands simplicity with a view to allowing high throughput approaches. In order to advance these requirements, we have developed and applied a primer design program, termed BatchPD, to achieve the PCR amplification of coding exons of all known human Refseq genes. Primer design, in silico PCR checks and formatted primer information for subsequent web-based interrogation are queried from existing online tools. BatchPD acts as an intermediate to automate queries and results processing and provides exon-specific information that is summarised in a spreadsheet format.