Dear All, I am MS student from Turkey, interested in sequence assembly. I was told to design primers out of some sff files, and got almost no help about it. Thanks to google, i found mira and ran it and got some contigs, then designed some primers out of them. My advisor quite like the output and the job i have done for now, and told me if i am interested in this topic, this could be my thesis. While doing that job(for experts like you, it is trivial of course) i did read mira v.2.9 manual and focused on your advices(assembly is done with latest version of MIRA). almost every day i got some mails from this talk-list and read most of them. But i am exactly at the beginning, mostly i do not understand what is the issue. I am wondering what are the basic steps of this area, what kind of instructions to follow, etc..? There are so many questions and most of them should be answered by my own effort of course, but where to dig to find the treasure? I am trying to read articles about the topic i am asking, but there are so many gaps. One tells about north, another from south. There might be some cookbooks, some recipes that can be followed i think. Any help would greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance, Best Regards Visam GULTEKIN Bioinformatics Lab, MSc Dep. of Mol. Bio. and Genetics Izmir High Technology Institute Gulbahce-35430, Izmir / Turkey