OligoMinerApp: a web-server application for the design of genome-scale oligonucleotide in situ hybridization probes through the flexible OligoMiner environment

Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) is a powerful single-cell technique that harnesses nucleic acid base pairing to detect the abundance and positioning of cellular RNA and DNA molecules in fixed samples. Recent technology development has paved the way to the construction of FISH probes entirely from synthetic oligonucleotides (oligos), allowing the optimization of thermodynamic properties together with the opportunity to design probes against any sequenced genome. However, comparatively little progress has been made in the development of computational tools to facilitate the oligos design, and even less has been done to extend their accessibility. OligoMiner is an open-source and modular pipeline written in Python that introduces a novel method of assessing probe specificity that employs supervised machine learning to predict probe binding specificity from genome-scale sequence alignment information. However, its use is restricted to only those people who are confident with command line interfaces because it lacks a Graphical User Interface (GUI), potentially cutting out many researchers from this technology. Here, we present OligoMinerApp (http://oligominerapp.org), a web-based application that aims to extend the OligoMiner framework through the implementation of a smart and easy-to-use GUI and the introduction of new functionalities specially designed to make effective probe mining available to everyone.