Software

A high-throughput pipeline for the design of real-time PCR signatures

Ravi Vijaya Satya, Kamal Kumar, Nela Zavaljevski and Jaques Reifman^*

• * Corresponding author: Jaques Reifman jaques.reifman@us.army.mil

Author Affiliations

Biotechnology HPC Software Applications Institute, Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, Fort Detrick, MD 21702, USA

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BMC Bioinformatics 2010, 11:340 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-11-340

Published: 23 June 2010

Abstract

Background

Pathogen diagnostic assays based on polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology provide high sensitivity and specificity. However, the design of these diagnostic assays is computationally intensive, requiring high-throughput methods to identify unique PCR signatures in the presence of an ever increasing availability of sequenced genomes.

Results

We present the Tool for PCR Signature Identification (TOPSI), a high-performance computing pipeline for the design of PCR-based pathogen diagnostic assays. The TOPSI pipeline efficiently designs PCR signatures common to multiple bacterial genomes by obtaining the shared regions through pairwise alignments between the input genomes. TOPSI successfully designed PCR signatures common to 18 Staphylococcus aureus genomes in less than 14 hours using 98 cores on a high-performance computing system.

Conclusions

TOPSI is a computationally efficient, fully integrated tool for high-throughput design of PCR signatures common to multiple bacterial genomes. TOPSI is freely available for download at http://www.bhsai.org/downloads/topsi.tar.gz webcite.