PREMIER Biosoft International today announced the world wide release of version 7 of Beacon Designer™ with support for Scorpions® assays, making it the only product to include comprehensive support for all the popular qPCR chemistries.

Palo Alto, California--February 24, 2007, PREMIER Biosoft International today announced the world wide release of Beacon Designer™ 7.0. Beacon Designer™ is the most comprehensive desktop tool for designing real-time PCR assays. Version 7.0 includes support for designing Scorpions® primers and probes.

Scorpions® are new diagnostic tools for the specific detection of PCR products in real-time. Scorpions® are reported to perform better under fast cycling conditions, making the technology ideal in numerous applications such as environmental analysis, viral load testing and pharmacogenomics.

"With the release of Beacon Designer™ Version 7, PREMIER Biosoft International has further expanded the supported chemistries of what was already the most comprehensive real time PCR oligo design tool available" says Kay Brown, V.P. Business Development and Marketing. " It is the tool of choice in labs world-wide. We are proud to have organizations such as NIH, FDA, CDC, USDA, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Unilever as our customers."

Beacon Designer™ designs oligos for SYBR® Green, TaqMan®, LNA™ spiked TaqMan®, MethyLight, molecular beacon, NASBA® and FRET assays. Beacon Designer™ also enables the design of compatible probes for proven SYBR® Green assays, resulting in cost savings.

Beacon Designer™ uses innovative and sophisticated algorithms to ensure assay success. Primers are designed avoiding regions of significant homology, identified by automatically interpreting BLAST search results. Primer efficiency is enhanced by designing them in template-structure-free regions. For multiplexing, Beacon Designer™ screens millions of primer probe combinations to design primer probe sets for single tube multiplex reactions. Whether the need is to incorporate well-proven sets for some of the templates, or include reference or housekeeping genes for normalization purposes in the assay, Beacon Designer™ is fully equipped.

For details, please visit: http://www.premierbiosoft.com/molecular_beacons/index.html.

About PREMIER Biosoft International:
Founded in 1994, the company is a group of computer scientists and molecular biologists dedicated to producing cutting edge intuitive software for the molecular biologist. The goal of the company is to study the most recent innovations in molecular biology and translate them into software products that aid biologists. Additional information about PREMIER Biosoft International can be found at http://www.premierbiosoft.com

Contact:
Arun Apte
PREMIER Biosoft International
650-856-2703
http://www.premierbiosoft.com