GENERAL NOISE


Possible Causes:
1) Poor Template Preparation: If your DNA is not clean enough (i.e. it contains salt, protein, ethanol, isopropanol or other contaminants) then the reaction will most likely fail. Solutions: When preparing your DNA be sure to follow the instructions in the kit (we recommend Qiagen or Promega) exactly. We recommend that you run your DNA on an agarose gel in addition to taking the OD on a spectrophotometer to see just how clean and how much DNA you actually have.

2) Primer Problems: It may be that your primer is not correctly annealing to your DNA template. In this case, your sequence will look exactly like the one displayed above. Solutions: Please make sure that your primer is designed correctly; we recommend using primer design software in order to eliminate the possibility of primer dimers or other primer design problems. Primer design software can also help determine if your primer’s annealing temperature is within the correct range. Just as important as the design of the primer is making sure that your primer is submitted at the correct concentration. We require primers to be submitted at 10ng/ul (~1uM).