The correct fluorescent dye used to label the primers depends on the specifications of the capillary electrophoresis device that you want to use. Devices from Applied Biosystems (ABI), Hitachi and Promega are currently compatible with the FAM label. Devices from SCIEX (Beckman Coulter) require the Cy5 label. A guide for which capillary electrophoresis devices are suitable for use with MLPA can be found in this article.

Background

MLPA primers are labelled with a fluorescent dye to allow visualisation of fragments on a capillary electrophoresis device (more about the technique). Different CE devices support dyes with different fluorescent spectra.

The item number of our reagent kits indicates the dye used to label the PCR primer in the kit. For example, EK1-FAM has FAM-labelled primer, while EK5-CY5 has Cy5-labelled primer.