Designing PCR Primers for the Amplification-Refractory Mutation System

The recent development in genetic research indicates that there exists intraspecific genetic variability in many organism groups. These variations, which result in a variety of genotypes and phenotypes within a population, are called polymorphism. Mutations in different ways can alter the organism's phenotype and affect its fitness, for example, by altering disease susceptibility or resistance. Therefore, the detection of point mutations in different genes of a population is of particular importance. The amplification-refractory mutation system technique is a PCR-based method to detect single nucleotide polymorphisms in the genome. The high repeatability, low cost, high accessibility, and no need for sophisticated technology are the main advantages of the ARMS-PCR technique, compared with other available methods such as PCR-RFLP. This chapter describes the design and analysis method of primers for the ARMS-PCR technique.