rRNA Probe Design
A Service for Diagnostics and Environmental Microbiology
Ribocon offers custom-made oligonucleotide probes for rRNA FISH (fluorescence in situ hybridization) based on more than 10 years of experience in the field and our high-quality 
rRNA databases.
The service targets users from Diagnostics (quality control, medical research) and projects in the field of Environmental Microbiology which rely on high-quality FISH experiments.
It is based on highest scientific standards. A personal contact person will take care about your data, your options, and your questions.
++ For more information and prices please contact
probes(at)ribocon.com
Some details on the probe design procedure ...
It is based on 4 steps:
- You define a single target sequence or group of interest by sending us sequences (if not published so far), accession numbers (if already submitted), or a combination of both. You can also define a group according to a taxonomy such as EMBL or SILVA.
- We calculate initial probe candidates based on a publicly available, up-to-date rRNA data set comprising more than 300,000 full length rRNA sequences. If no suitable probes in terms of discriminatory power are available based on the current data sets, this will become clear, immediately. You will get informed and you don't have to pay for this service!
- We manually search for adequate probes from the list of candidates. In this procedure we take into account various parameters affecting a hybridization reaction such as location and quality of mismatches, secondary structures, and in situ accessibility. Finally, probe binding sites are also checked on the alignment level where potential sequencing errors leading to artificial discriminatory power can be identified.
- We provide the final probe sequences plus a quality sheet. The latter characterizes your probes including their specificity in detail. If more than one suitable probe is found matching the quality criteria, all of them will be reported. The parallel application of these multiple redundant probes in your experiments dramatically increases the quality of your analysis.
Probe/primer evaluation
Ribocon also evaluates the in silico probe specificity of your existing rRNA probes and rDNA primers based on our comprehensive databases.
We have the bioinformatics infrastructure to match your signatures against millions of rDNA reference sequences and to provide detailed reports.
We will identify any potential problem of your probes/primers.
Probe and primer synthesis by our partner biomers.net
For synthesis and labelling of probes we recommend our partner 
biomers.net.
Based on the sequence signatures received from us, you can directly order at biomers.net (biomers.net order). There, you also find a detailed price list.
If you prefer an all-in-one solution, we can also arrange direct delivery of the ready-to-use FISH probes for you - without extra charge!