St. Louis, Mo. – Sigma Life Science, the innovative biological products and services research business of Sigma-Aldrich® (Nasdaq: SIAL), today announced the release of OligoArchitect™, an online primer and probe design tool.

This freely available tool offers automated design of probes and primers for real-time qPCR assays, powered by the industry standard Beacon Designer™ platform from PREMIER Biosoft, it complements Sigma Life Science’s comprehensive portfolio of oligonucleotide and qPCR products and customized oligonucleotide services. To access the OligoArchitect tool, visit wherebiobegins.com/probedesignonline

The easy-to-use OligoArchitect software uses the latest probe design algorithms, providing results in real time and supporting templates of up to 10,000 base pairs. It also allows users to adjust various input parameters – such as homopolymer run/repeat maximum length, G/C clamp length and maximum primer pair Tm mismatch – to help optimize probe or primer design.

“After years of successful use internally by our technical support team, we wanted to offer this powerful tool directly to our customers,” said Tom Russell, Product Manager at Sigma Life Science. “We chose to use Beacon Designer because it offers best-in-class performance and is highly regarded by the research community.”

OligoArchitect currently supports both SYBR® Green I and dual-labeled probe (5’ nuclease assay) detection chemistries with additional detection chemistries and assays expected to be added later this year, making it ideally suited to key applications in traditional PCR, endpoint genotyping, gene expression analysis, genomic copy number determination, allele discrimination, SNP detection and haplotyping.

For more information about Sigma Life Science’s custom oligonucelotides services, please visit www.wherebiobegins.com/oligos.

Cautionary Statement: The foregoing release contains forward-looking statements that can be identified by terminology such as “expected,” “ideally suited” or similar expressions, or by expressed or implied discussions regarding potential future revenues from products derived therefrom. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. Such forward-looking statements reflect the current views of management regarding future events, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such statements. There can be no guarantee that OligoArchitect software will assist the Company to achieve any particular levels of revenue in the future. In particular, management’s expectations regarding products associated with OligoArchitect software could be affected by, among other things, unexpected regulatory actions or delays or government regulation generally; the Company’s ability to obtain or maintain patent or other proprietary intellectual property protection; competition in general; government, industry and general public pricing pressures; the impact that the foregoing factors could have on the values attributed to the Company’s assets and liabilities as recorded in its consolidated balance sheet, and other risks and factors referred to in Sigma-Aldrich’s current Form 10-K on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those anticipated, believed, estimated or expected. Sigma-Aldrich is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

About Sigma Life Science: Sigma Life Science is a Sigma-Aldrich business that represents the Company’s leadership in innovative biological products and services for the global life science market and offers an array of biologically-rich products and reagents that researchers use in scientific investigation. Product areas include biomolecules, genomics and functional genomics, cells and cell-based assays, transgenics, protein assays, stem cell research, epigenetics and custom services/oligonucleotides. Sigma Life Science also provides an extensive range critical bioessentials like biochemicals, antibiotics, buffers, carbohydrates, enzymes, forensic tools, hematology and histology, nucleotides, amino acids and their derivatives, and cell culture media.

About Sigma-Aldrich: Sigma-Aldrich is a leading Life Science and High Technology company committed to Enabling Science to Improve the Quality of Life. Its chemical and biochemical products and kits are used in scientific research, including genomic and proteomic research, biotechnology, pharmaceutical development and as key components in pharmaceutical, diagnostic and other high technology manufacturing. The Company has customers in life science companies, university and government institutions, hospitals, and in industry. Over one million scientists and technologists use its products. Sigma-Aldrich operates in 40 countries and has 7,900 employees providing excellent service worldwide. For more information about Sigma-Aldrich, please visit its award-winning Web site at http://www.sigma-aldrich.com.