Why are there “mutations” in my oligo?
Good question. This is what a lot of oligo companies don’t want to talk about but we at 1st BASE have something to say about it. At 1st BASE we recognize and know that ALL Oligos manufactured will consist of a population with mutations. Mutations arise in some regions in Oligo sequences which, because of their folding properties, are very difficult to synthesize and therefore have an increased mutation rate at precisely these points. Other reasons are limitations in chemistry and synthesis technology. These are not mistakes during manual typing of sequences (sequences are imported electronically and error free into the production software), but the errors affect only a small portion of the molecules and are spread randomly over the sequence at a very low rate. We know that mutations are very frustrating for our customers, therefore we invest a lot of effort in our 5 step QC. Above this we also do periodic QC checks on our synthesizers to ensure they operate efficiently. The mutation ra
