Screening using UniVec is efficient because a large number of redundant sub-sequences have been eliminated to create a database that contains only one copy of every unique sequence segment from a large number of vectors. This enables contamination with these oligonucleotide sequences to be found during the vector screen.
Many vectors have the same backbone or share common functional cassettes.
Consequently, databases with the full sequence for each vector contain multiple copies of such elements. A single copy of each unique element is sufficient to allow that sequence to be recognized as vector contamination. The size of a database designed for screening can therefore be greatly reduced by eliminating the redundant copies of any sequence. The UniVec database is built by sequentially processing each input sequence. The input sequence is first compared to all the sequences already in the database.