We are pleased to provide as much bait design advice and assistance as possible. However we are unlikely to be sufficiently knowledgeable in your particular field as to help you pick the specific genes/targets for your project. Whether this is your first NGS project and/or you are an experienced genetics researcher, we always recommend that you choose your targets in collaboration with your full research team, especially your bioinformatician(s), so that your kit design is as robust as possible.

Some general suggestions appropriate for many projects would be to exhaustively survey the literature for your organism(s), and consider including neutral and/or control loci in addition to specific targets of interest. You should include enough loci and/or SNPs to draw significant conclusions within the number of specimens that you plan to survey. You should make sure that you have thoroughly evaluated your bait design before proceeding with your kit order.

If you are beginning a completely new project, you may wish to order the smallest number of reactions upfront, and place a reorder for a larger number of reactions once you have tested the design. However please note that any changes to your design (adding or removing baits) would be ordered as a fully new custom kit, which may have a longer delivery time than a reorder of a previous design.