In a paper published online in advance in Nucleic Acids Research this week, researchers at Illumina describe their approach to "make individual or pools of purified 5' biotin-functionalized oligonucleotides," which they say is "based on 5'-hexa-His phase tag purification, followed by exchange of the hexa-His tag for a functional group using reversible reaction chemistry." The Illumina team reports cases in which it prepared "5'-biotin, 95-mer, oligonucleotide pools of [greater than] 40K complexity at micromole scale," and discusses the potential of its approach for use in other applications.
For its database issue, Nucleic Acids Research this week published three papers online in advance from researchers who present "a comprehensive online resource for fission yeast," an allele frequency resource, and "a repository of experimentally characterized prokaryotic glycoproteins." The University of Cambridge's Valerie Wood and her colleagues present PomBase, Yale University School of Medicine's Haseena Rajeevan et al. describe ALFRED, and Aadil Bhat and colleagues at India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research present ProGlycProt, respectively.