Although it can predict many aspects of long oligonucleotide hybridization in 3 M TMAC at 45 C, the NucZip concept has to be amended to include other temperatures, oligonucleotide concentrations and buffers in order to be generally useful. The NN model, which was developed with great precision by SantaLucia et al. (8, (20) (21) (22) and is used in the Visual OMP TM 7.0 computer program, is much more sophisticated than our procedure. It was considered out of the scope of this article to evaluate the Visual OMP TM 7.0 program in detail; however, importantly, its hybridization conditions can be adjusted. When Visual OMP TM 7.0 was used to calculate ÁG (Figure 6 ), the buffer and temperature conditions were set at 3 M TMAC and 45 C. Comparison of the NucZip and Visual OMP TM 7.0 models showed that the distribution of the targets with the long dangling ends (74%_Xnt) was corrected to a certain extent by NucZip; however, neither NucZip nor Visual OMP 7.0 accurately predicted the hybridization behavior of the short perfectly matching probe-target combinations of the InflA probe with the 15nt_free, 18nt_free and 22nt_free targets.