I am planning for gene expression analysis in infected human cell lines. I think using commercial primers and probes for IFNs and ISGs will save time. So, looking for companies that provide best primers and probes.
I don't use them because of expense, but if do you decide to design them yourself, there are a lot of easy to use tools out there. I like the IDT Primer Quest program on the IDT website, and you can select it to design both primers and probe, and can easily check the primers they suggest for hairpins and by blast just by clicking.