For one-off analyses I use Applied Biosystems TaqMan Gene Expression sets (primer pair and dual labeled probe). These are quite expensive so for assays that we are likely to do very often, I am looking for something a lot cheaper.

Is there some resource where a user can input eg. human IL-6 TaqMan primers & probe and be given the sequences of the three oligonucleotides which can then be ordered from companies other than AB? Ideally such a database would contain info on sequences that have been validated already.

Failing this, what about good software for designing sets on the basis of an input cDNA sequence?

Thanks