Company Announcements

Sigma-Aldrich agreed to exclusively distribute research quantities of SouthWest NanoTechnologies’ SWeNT CG 100, SG 65 and SG 76 single-wall carbon nanotubes through its Aldrich division.

In January, Sigma-Aldrich acquired the antibody-based Seppro affinity depletion technology and a library of 7,000 avian-derived antibodies from Genway Biotech.

In December 2008, bioMerieux acquired PML Microbiologicals, a provider of culture media and microbiological products in North America, from Pelican Life Sciences for $29.6 million. PML had 2007 sales of $24 million.

Kazusa DNA Research Institute will offer vectors encoding Promega’s HaloTag with genetic content from its catalog. The initial offering encompassing over 1,900 of the Institute’s ORF clones in Promega Flexi vector.

Gene synthesis and protein engineering firm DNA2.0 opened a UK office in December 2008.

Jackson ImmunoResearch Laboratories gained exclusive rights to use Thermo Fisher Scientific’s DyLight fluorescent dyes with its line of secondary antibodies.

Under a distribution and OEM agreement, Life Technologies will sell Bioheart’s myoblast (muscle-derived stem cells) cell-based research products.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation granted VistaGen Therapeutics a license to human embryonic stem cell patents for the development and commercialization of stem cell–based research tools.

In December 2008, Fluorotechnics revised its revenue forecast for the year ending June 30, 2009, from $7.5 million to approximately $4 million due to a delay in the increase of production capacity, the slower than anticipated conversion of a European customer and the cancellation of orders by a major US customer.

Platypus Technologies named Richard S. Schifreen, PhD, president and CEO in December 2008. He was formerly vice president of Research Products at Mirus Bio.

Product Introductions

Thermo Fisher Scientific introduced the Nunc UpCell Surface for temperature-induced cell harvesting. It eliminates the need for enzymatic treatment and cell scraping.

PerkinElmer expanded its homogenous bead-based AlphaLISA “No Wash” assay line to 27 kits.

PerkinElmer released 11 new AlphaScreen SureFire assay kits for the rapid detection of full-length kinase activation in cell lysates, bringing the number of kits to 39.

Invitrogen launched two RiboMinus for RNA sequencing kits: a universal kit for eukaryotes and a more specialized kit for plants. It also introduced the E-Gel SizeSelect 2% precast agarose gels for the separation and recovery of nucleic acid fragments of less than 1,000 base pairs for short-read fragment library construction.

HTG introduced a customizable Quantitative Nuclease Protection Assay ArrayPlate.