openPrimeR is an R package providing methods for designing, evaluating,and comparing primer sets for multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The package provides a primer design function that generates novel primer setes by solving a set cover problem such that the number of covered template sequences is maximized with the smallest possible set of primers. Moreover, existing primer sets can be evaluated according to their coverage and their fulfillment of constraints on the PCR-relevant physicochemical properties. For PCR tasks for which multiple possible primer sets exist, openPrimeR can facilitate the selection of the most suitable set by performing comparative analyses. The R package includes a Shiny application that provides a comprehensive and intuitive user interface for the core functionalites of the package.
For more information on how to install openPrimeR, we refer to the corresponding user-space repository, which provides several installation routines.
Take a look at the CHANGELOG to view recent changes to the project.