FastPCR is a software tool, mostly designed for professionals, that facilitates the designing of PCR primers for standard, long-distance, multiplex PCR, inverse, or real-time PCR. By using this tool, users can handle long sequences and sets of nucleic acid or protein sequences.
Its interface has a standard look, but it's crowded with lots of tabs, toolbars, and various options. Inexperienced users may find it difficult to navigate through it, because of its multiple and complex settings. The toolbar icons could've been better polished, while the response to user actions can become tricky at times.
As per its functional features, the program provides the means to design long oligonucleotide to be later used for microarray analyses. Also, it includes a comprehensive primer test that can calculate the melting temperature for standard and degenerate oligonucleotides.
Furthermore, FastPCR comes with various bioinformatics tools for analyzing the sequences with GC or AT skew. There are also several sequence alignment tools that are able to support the assembly of a set of contiguous sequences.
All things considered, FastPCR is a comprehensive software tool for users who work with PCR primers. The only big con is represented by its price tag.
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