Posts Tagged ‘Bio-Rad’

News: Droplet Digital PCR Improves Detection Sensitivity of Telomerase Activity Assay

 :: Posted by American Biotechnologist on 04-10-2013

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, and Bio-Rad have demonstrated that Bio-Rad’s Droplet Digital PCR (ddPCR) technology can dramatically improve the sensitivity, precision, and throughput of a popular assay for telomerase activity.

Currently, researchers are investigating telomerase activity as a biomarker for cancer diagnosis and as a target for anticancer drugs. Measuring it’s activity more sensitivity may enhance our understanding of it’s role in diseases.

This research was presented at the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting on Tuesday, April 9.

You can view the press release here: http://bit.ly/12KJyUk

Multiplexing Bio-Plex Pro Diabetes and Cytokine Assays

 :: Posted by American Biotechnologist on 07-01-2010

In a previous post we introduced Bio-Rad’s Bio-Plex Pro Diabetes and Cytokine assays and mentioned how one of the biggest advantages that the kit offers to researchers is the ability to multiplex cytokine and diabetes biomarkers in one tube. In the attached tech note: Multiplexing Compatibility of the Bio-Plex Pro Diabetes and Cytokine Assays: Human and Mouse Panels, Zimmerman et al. demonstrate the compatibility of 40 human cytokine assays with all 10 human diabetes assays and 32 mouse cytokine assays with all 8 mouse diabetes assays. The data includes an analysis of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy with limits of detection as low as 0.1pg/ml for several cytokine and diabetes biomarkers.

Multiplexing Compatibility of the Bio-Plex Pro Diabetes and Cytokine Assays: Human and Mouse Panels

How to Perform Highly Efficient Reverse siRNA Transfection

 :: Posted by American Biotechnologist on 05-03-2010

Short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are powerful tools to suppress gene expression in mamalian cells. While siRNA transfection can often be bogged down by cell seeding and density the highlited study demonstrates a highly efficient reverse siRNA transfection protocol for A549 cells using Bio-Rad’s siLentFect lipid reagent that does not require prior seeding of cells. Furtheromore, the simplicity of the protocol makes it suitable for high-throughput transfection. The authors acheived an average of 94% knockdown for the two genes that were targetted without impairing cell viability.

<highly efficient reverse siRNA transfection

How to Avoid Unstable Results When Performing High-Throughput qPCR

 :: Posted by American Biotechnologist on 04-28-2010

If your biotechnology research requires you to be engaged in high-throughput Quantitative PCR analysis than you’ve probably made good use out of automated systems such as liquid handling robots and plate stackers. And what a relief they are. Imagine what your poor thumb would feel like if you had to pipette out tens of thousands of reactions. Or think about how much time you would have wasted standing around waiting for a run to end in order to load the next plate into the QPCR machine.

While automated handing systems are fantastic, they also bring with them the complicated question of sample stability. When samples are loaded into the automated system, they may be stored there at room temperature for hours. As such, it is important for the reaction mix to be stable at room temperature for the duration of the waiting period.

In this Bio-Rad Technical note, you will learn how Bio-Rad’s SsoFast EvaGreen supermix meets the challenge of providing reaction mix stability and can be used to acheive consistent results over a large dynamic range of templates with automated runs lastng up to 48 hours.

Stability for Automated qPCR

Faster, Cleaner and More Specific Affinity Tag Purification

 :: Posted by American Biotechnologist on 04-22-2010

Protein overexpression and affinity purification are used in various biotechnology research fields and play an important role in the post genomic era. While many of the common purification techniques make use of tags like 6XHis and GST, they face drawbacks such as significant background and an extra tag-removal step (especially if the tag is known to interfere with the protein’s function).

Bio-Rad’s Profinity eXact protein purification system utilizes an immobilized engineered protease that specifically recognizes and binds the Profinity eXact tag with high affinity. Following purification, the protein is washed and the tag is cleaved while still on-column.

This technical note demonstrates how the Profinity eXact purification system overcomes concerns common to expression and purification systems in eukaryotic cells including: poor tag expression, tag degradation, posttranslational modification and misfolding of tag and excessive background contamination. The results indicate that the Profinity eXact system can be used in eukaryotic cells for single-step purification of tag-free proteins with low background and without compromising the obvious function of the system.

Faster, Cleaner, More Specific Affinity Tag Purification