This tool allows one to find barcodes in our sequencing system from given sequences of bases. It should assist in selecting the corrent barcodes for your submission forms, or highlight that we may need to add a new index type and set of barcodes.

The tool is a simple look up of sequences to find any barcodes that match. This is an exact match: it will only find barcodes of the same length and sequence. It will not return, for example, a six base sequence within the sequence of an eight base index. It does not do “near” matching, where there is a difference in one or more bases.

The tool supports single and dual index. In the latter case, the sequences should be separated by a single hyphen (“-”). The search will automatically cope try to find matches with the reverse complement of the second index, as this is a common cause of confusion. All our barcode sequences are in our system in the forward direction, with our post-sequencing processing automatically creating the reverse complement when required.

One does not have to provide all barcodes of the same length and type for a search. This set would all be valid to search for at once:

ACGTCA
ATGGTCAT
GTCATGAA-TGCTAGTA
ATGTCA-TAGCTACG

I have not checked if these actually match any of our barcodes! It is just for example.

Simply copy and paste your sequences, one per line, into the text box and click the “update” button. The tool will perform its search and return the results as a table giving every barcode each sequence can be found in. The table will show each (valid) sequence in the order submitted, together with the label of the barcode it is found in and the barcode category (index type) it belongs to.

If the search matches a barcode with the reverse complement in index two, the barcode name is highlighted in bold.

An example:

Note that the sequences AACGTCTG-GCGTCATT and AACGTCTG-AATGACGC are effectively the same, just with index two having the reverse complement. This is why the same barcodes are found for two different sequences.