Primer3Plus version:
Primer3 version:
Source code is available at href="https://github.com/primer3-org.
We request but do not require that use of this software be cited in publications as
Untergasser A, Cutcutache I, Koressaar T, Ye J, Faircloth BC, Remm M and Rozen SG.
Primer3--new capabilities and interfaces.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2012 Aug 1;40(15):e115.
The paper is available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3424584/
Source code available at href="https://github.com/primer3-org.
The development of primer3 is promoted by a small group of enthusiastic scientists mainly in their free time.They do not gain any financial profit with primer3.
There are two groups of primer3 users: end users, who run primer3 to pick their primers and programmers, who use primer3 in their scripts or software packages. We encourage both to use primer3.
If you are an end user, we request but do not require that use of this software be cited in publications as listed above under CITING PRIMER3.
If you are a programmer, you will see that primer3 is now distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or (at your option) any later version of the License (GPL3). As we understand it, if you include parts of the primer3 source code in your source code or link to primer3 binary libraries in your executable, you have to release your software also under GPL3. If you only call primer3 from your software and interpret its output, you can use any license you want for your software. If you modify primer3 and then release your modified software, you have to release your modifications in source code under GPL3 as well.
We chose GPL3 because we wanted primer3 to evolve and for the improvements to find their way back into the main distribution. If you are programming a new web interface which runs primer3, please include in the about page of the tool the sentence "<your software name> uses primer3 version ...". Please consider releasing your software under GPL3 as well, especially if you do not want to maintain it in the future.
There is no need to ask us for permission to include primer3 in your tools.
Initial development of Primer3 was funded by Howard Hughes Medical Institute and by the National Institutes of Health, National Human Genome Research Institute under grants R01-HG00257 (to David C. Page) and P50-HG00098 (to Eric S. Lander), but ongoing development and maintenance are not currently funded.
Primer3 was originally written by Helen J. Skaletsky (Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Whitehead Institute) and Steve Rozen (Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore, formerly at Whitehead Institute) based on the design of earlier versions, notably Primer 0.5 (Steve Lincoln, Mark Daly, and Eric S. Lander). The original web interface was designed by Richard Resnick. Lincoln Stein designed the Boulder-IO format in the days before XML and RDF, and championed the idea of making primer3 a software component, which has been key to its wide utility.
In addition, among others, Ernst Molitor, Carl Foeller, and James Bonfield contributed to the early design of primer3. Brant Faircloth has helped with ensuring that primer3 runs on Windows and MacOS and with the primer3 web site. Triinu Koressaar and Maido Remm modernized the melting temperature calculations in 2008. Triinu Koressaar added secondary structure, primer-dimer, and template mispriming based on a thermodynamic model in 2.2.0. Ioana Cutcutache is responsible for most of the remaining improvements in 2.2.0, including performance enhancements, modern command line arguments, and new input tags to control primer location (with the "overlap junction" tags initially implemented by Andreas Untergasser). Jian Ye patiently provided new requirements.
Harm Nijveen and Andreas Untergasser developed the webinterface Primer3Plus in 2006-2009. Currently Primer3Plus is maintained by Andreas Untergasser and was rewritten in Python 2018.
Primer3Plus and Primer3 are an open software development projects hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/primer3-org .
Copyright (c) 1996 - 2018
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Steve Rozen,
Andreas Untergasser and Helen Skaletsky. All rights reserved.
Primer3Plus is part of the Primer3 suite and libraries.
The Primer3 suite and libraries are free software;
you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms
of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
your option) any later version.
This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this software (file LICENSE in the source
distribution); If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS
"AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR
A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT
OWNERS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,
SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,
DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY
THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT
(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE
OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.