PREMIER Biosoft International today announced the world wide release of version 6 of Beacon Designer™ with support for MethyLight assays. Beacon Designer™ is the only tool available for most of the popular real time PCR chemistries such as SYBR® Green, TaqMan®, molecular beacon and FRET.

Palo Alto, California--August 31, 2006, PREMIER Biosoft International today announced the world wide release of version 6 of Beacon Designer™, the only tool available for most of the popular real time PCR chemistries such as SYBR® Green, TaqMan®, molecular beacon and FRET. Version 6 includes support for MethyLight assays.

MethyLight assay, a TaqMan® probe based technique, can be effectively used for DNA methylation profiling, measuring DNA methylation or detecting methylated alleles in presence of the non-methylated ones. Due to the specificity of TaqMan® based assays, it is much more accurate than an end point detection assay such as methyl specific PCR (MSP).

"With the release of Beacon Designer™ Version 6, PREMIER Biosoft International has taken a step further in making a comprehensive, sophisticated and powerful real time PCR oligo design tool available to thousands of labs all over the world," says Kay Brown, V.P. Business Development and Marketing. " We are proud to have organizations such as NIH, FDA, CDC, USDA, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Unilever as our customers."

Beacon Designer™ designs oligos for SYBR® Green, TaqMan®, LNA™ spiked TaqMan®, MethyLight, molecular beacon, NASBA® and FRET assays. Beacon Designer™ also enables the design of compatible probes for proven SYBR® Green assays, resulting in cost saving.

The most notable feature of Beacon Designer™ is the use of innovative and sophisticated algorithms to ensure assay success. Primers are designed avoiding regions of significant homology, identified by automatically interpreting BLAST search results. Primer efficiency is enhanced by designing them in template-structure-free regions. For multiplexing, Beacon Designer™ screens millions of primer probe combinations to design primer probe sets for single tube multiplex reactions. Whether the need is to incorporate well-proven sets for some of the templates, or include reference or housekeeping genes for normalization purposes in the assay, Beacon Designer™ is fully equipped.
For details, please visit: http://www.premierbiosoft.com/molecular_beacons/index.html.