Epcr and primer-blast

[Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu>]

Hi,

I'm about to update the epcr package but its homepage[1] says:



   The e-PCR suite of tools has been retired. Please consider using
   PrimerBLAST[2] as an alternative if you are interested in designing
   PCR primers or identifying target sequences for your primers.

   For more information, see "Electronic-PCR (e-PCR) is retiring, use
   Primer-BLAST instead"[3] at the NCBI Insights blog.


Please excuse my ignorance but I know nothing about primer design at
all.  I somehow suspect that the command line tool e-PCR should now be
replaced by a web tool (or am I missing something?  I can not find
something inside the blast package which looks like a command line
replacement).  Currently epcr has a popcon which is somehow "medium" in
our Debian Med package set - so there is some relevant user base that
is using a discontinued / replaced tool.

What do you think?

Kind regards

     Andreas.


[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/epcr/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/primer-blast/index.cgi
[3] https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2017/06/28/e-pcr-is-retiring-use-primer-blast

-- 
http://fam-tille.de