There are increasing threats of non-human viral pathogens gaining ability to infect humans and prevalent human pathogenic viruses evolving into more virulent forms. In such situations, the disease outbreaks can quickly acquire epidemic status due to absence of resistance in human populations.

Accurate identification and detection of viral pathogens is essential for determining nature of the infectious agent during presumed outbreaks, for choosing the right therapeutic treatment and disease surveillance for public health management. Molecular pathogen detection techniques like microarrays could provide a rapid, reliable, sensitive, and robust technology to accurately determine specific viral pathogen in the sample. Appropriately designed microarrays are particularly useful when the nature of the pathogen is unclear or for detecting new emerging pathogens.

This resource is compilation of a set of unique oligos designed to detect specific as well as broad classes of human and other vertebrate respiratory viral pathogens. All the oligos are designed to have uniform melting temperatures, GC content range and minimal secondary structure effects. Moreover, the specificity of the oligos have also been determined against human transcriptome to avoid cross-contaminating signals from human mRNA in the sample.