The allele-specific PCR also called as an ARMS- PCR (amplification refractory mutation system) or PASA (PCR amplification of specific alleles) or AS-PCR used to detect the SNPs.
As a general rule for ARMS primer design, if the 3' terminal mismatch is a weak one, a strong secondary mismatch is engineered. If it is a strong one, a weak secondary mismatch is introduced. Try putting the mismatch at the second nucleotide in the first instance and test the primer for specificity and generation of product. The position of the mismatch can be altered if the primer does not work, or the strength of the mismatch increased if non-specific bands are observed. According to Little in Current Protocols in Human Genetics (28), the strength of mismatch pairings are; maximum, GA, CT, TT; strong, CC; medium, AA, GG; Weak, CA, GT; none, AT, GC
General principles of designing a PCR primer as discussed in chapter 3 also apply to the ARMS primers. The ARMS PCR requires a pair of primers including a common and an ARMS primer. The common primer is like any other PCR primer. But the ARMS primer has the following special features:
1. The primer is usually 30 bases in length.
2. The nucleotide at the 3’ end of the primer should be complementary to the target nucleotide i.e. G for C or C for G and T for A or A for T. Mismatch at this position can dramatically reduce the amplification. A:G, G:A, and C:C mismatches have the worst effect whereas the other mismatches have varying degrees of effect. For example in a mutation with A-T substitution the ARMS primer for the mutant allele should have the last nucleotide complementary to the nucleotide T i.e. it should have A. The primer for the normal allele at the same position should be complementary to the nucleotide A i.e. it should have T (Fig. 7.1).
3. An additional mismatch at one of the last five nucleotides of the ARMS primer further increases its specificity.
4. It is customary to include an internal PCR control in ARMS reactions. A pair of primers is designed to amplify a region of the gene of interest that usually is free of mutations. An amplification of the internal control region and no amplification by the ARMS primer indicate a true negative. In a false negative result neither the ARMS primer nor the internal control shows any amplification. There could be several reasons for the false negative result e.g. too little or too much DNA, poor
quality of DNA template, failure to add primer, Taq, or other reagents and presence of PCR inhibitors.
5. The sensitivity and specificity of an ARMS reaction can be controlled by stringent reaction conditions. Good primer design, higher annealing temperature and limited number of cycles are important in avoiding false results. The number of cycles should be just enough to give a clear positive result. Increasing the number of cycles un-necessarily can cause false positives. The usual length of ARMS primer is 30 bases. Primers of this length have a high Tm and annealing temperature and are therefore more specific.
In ARMS-PCR, 2 pairs of primers in a single PCR tube, can simultaneously amplify both mutant and normal alleles as well as allow amplification of an internal DNA control. This technique has been applied to study different mutations. tetra-primer PCR in which allele-specific amplification is achieved in a single PCR reaction using two outer primers and two allele-specific inner primers. combined tetra-primer PCR with ARMS to form the tetra-primer ARMS-PCR or T-ARMS technique by introducing deliberate mismatches at position − 2 from the 3′ end of inner primers to improve allele specificity. In a single step reaction, the outer primers amplify a large fragment of the target gene, irrespective of its genotype although each inner primer combines with a particular opposite outer primer to generate smaller allele-specific amplicons, which are of different sizes and can easily be discriminated on gel electrophoresis either as homozygous or heterozygous.
link: Article Designing, optimization and validation of tetra-primer ARMS ...
I have designed the primer by
ARMS PCR Primers were designed using Primer1(http://primer1.soton.ac.uk/primer1.html) only Inner forward and inner reverse primers were selected for allele specificity. For reference