Micro Array Oligo design
Computer exercise by
Henrik Bjørn Nielsen
The exercises objective is to make you familiar with the parameters
that are important for designing oligos for spotted arrays. This we hope you
will achieve by this hands-on exercise.
To make things easy for yourself, login to genome.cbs.dtu.dk. Make an
exercise directory and go there. Then type:
alias
oligowiz /usr/opt/www/pub/CBS/services/DNAarray/OligoWiz/oligowiz.pl
ln -s ~mic00/microarray/yeast_ESTs.fsa yeast_ESTs.fsa
In this exercise you should design oligos for the 100 yeast EST’s in
the file: yeast_ESTs.fsa now in your exercise
folder. Alternatively you could find some other sequences to play with on the
web but remember they must be in FASTA format. And if it is to make any sense
you must restrict yourself to sequences originating from species that our
program OligoWiz has databases for. OligoWiz has currently databases for the
following species:
A. thaliana
B. subtilis
C. elegans
D. melanogaster
E. coli (K12)
Human (unigene)
M. musculus (unigene)
S. cerevisiae
First thing to do is to calculate the parameters for the EST sequences.
This can be done by the program oligowiz.pl
To calculate the oligo parameters with default settings type:
oligowiz -in yeast_ESTs.fsa -species S.cerevisiae > yeast_ESTs.owz
This may take some time (1-5 min).
You can also play with the settings. To get help on oligowiz type:
oligowiz
-h
If you want to design oligos for E. coli, which two parameters (besides
the input file name) would you probably want to change then?
Now you have an owz file in your course directory it’s time to look at
the parameters.
Download the oligowiz.jar
program as well as your .owz and .fsa file.
Then run oligowiz.jar on your local machine.
In oligowiz.jar open the owz file (Alt-O). Select an entry from the
bottom frame of oligowiz.jar and adjust the parameter weights in the middle
frame. Note that you can hide some parameters to get a better overview.
Try to consider what parameters you find most relevant for an
expression study, and try to consider the individual parameter distributions.
If you think you have found some nice weights try to press the “Apply
to all” button and look trough some more entries to see if the parameters also
looks good for these entries.
Finally try to export the oligos (Alt-E).
If you have extra time try to see how the parameters change if you
design 30’mers instead of 50’mers
For supplementary reading on oligo design see
Backup.owz file!