Custom DNA Oligo Synthesis From Invitrogen

DNA oligos are often required in molecular biology for use as primers or probes. Rather than synthesize these products in the lab, they can be ordered from companies that specialize in providing oligos for research. Invitrogen is one of several companies offering a Custom DNA Oligo Synthesis Service for these occasions.

Invitrogen has an excellent website which details the services available for synthesized oligos and includes a couple of tools for designing primers, which is a nice touch. Customers can submit their orders via the web, fax or email. The online submission form is simple and once registered, users are able to enter single oligos or copy-and-paste large orders from a form or spreadsheet for faster entry. The customer can then choose further options for synthesis. A standard oligo to be used for sequencing, PCR or a microarray is usually purified and desalted. Additional purification procedures are available on request (for example, HPLC) and Invitrogen recommend further purification for oligos which will be used in mutagenesis and cloning experiments. Primers can be up to 100 bases in length, and manufactured on a scale from 10 µmol to 25 nmol. Large scale synthesis is limited to primers of 50 or fewer bases. Invitrogen guarantee to replace any oligos that are found to have mutations, free of charge.

Further options for synthesis can include modification with various tags at either end of the primer or internally (for example, phosphate, biotin, Molecular Probes fluorescent dyes or alternative bases). For the high-throughput user, the company can also provide oligos in 96-well or 384-well plates in solution or as a precipitate. Invitrogen also provides a separate service for RNA and RNAi synthesis.

We have used Invitrogen for a year in our laboratory and have found the primers to be purified well without any mutations. We have found that mutagenesis and cloning primers work well without the further purification suggested by the company. A recent survey of DNA oligo providers for our area found that Invitrogen offers the most competitive price per base by far. In our experience, their primers take longer to be delivered than from our other DNA oligo provider. Standard primers up to 50 bases may be delivered in 3-4 days (compared to 2 days) but primers of 51 bases or more can be 6 to 9 days and modified oligos up to 16 days from order to delivery. This is a major consideration if working on a fast-moving research project.