Table 1.

Criteria for oligonucleotide probe selection

Oligo selection criterion	probes satisfying the rule [%]	Rule symbol
Oligonucleotide properties
Melting temperature = 70°C (+/- 8°C)	97.18%	T
Nucleotide composition: oligonucleotide cannot have a contiguous single nucleotide base repeat longer than 8 bases AND probe GC content fits the 20-to-60% range AND each base cannot constitute more than 40% of the oligonucleotide sequence	85.33%	C
Secondary structure
Stem of potential hairpin structure cannot be longer than 8 bases	99.20%	H
Probe specificity
Minimum Hamming distance to non-target parts of genome > 25	99.45%	D
Substring: not more than 20 contiguous bases common to other (non-target) parts of genome	99.02%	S