Lidstrom:Oligo Orders

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Invitrogen

• Most people order from Invitrogen. Ask Melissa for the excel sheet with which to order, and return it to her filled in.
• They ship for free, and have a good price.

IDT

• IDT is the synthetic biology industry standard.
• Janet and Amanda use IDT for larger oligo orders because it is cheap, we can enter orders ourselves, and they are delivered the next day if you order by 3pm. (Technically next-day delivery is not a rule, but it is true 99.9% of the time.)
• They charge $0.14/bp and ship to the lab for free for orders over $50. IF you don't make that cutoff, shipping is ~$13. Conveniently when you check out they quote $0.35/bp so it is not hard to meet the $50 minimum; the price is adjusted to $0.14/bp after you finish checking out.
• Don't bother with same-day oligo orders. It just costs a lot extra to have a guarantee that your oligos will arrive ~10:30am the next day when you order by 1pm. Sometimes they come in the afternoon, though.
• Many labs have primers shipped to the biochemistry store on campus for free. We would need a second account to do this, and don't currently have one. So if your order is not free to ship, we use Invitrogen.
• Click "ship order when complete" not "ship items as available" because then you will lose your free shipping privileges.
• If you are wondering if your primer will ship the next day, you can log in and look at the order history. They update the website within a few hours to "shipped." You can ask customer service (chat or phone) if your status is "in production" and they can track it down if it is important.