Company Announcements

Life Technologies named Rhenium its principal distributor in Israel.

MP Biomedicals appointed Todd R. Nelson, PhD, as president and CEO in December 2011. He was formerly CEO of eBioscience.

Avacta acquired Aptuscan, a developer of affinity protein scaffolds, in January for £1.5 million ($2.3 million).

Under a license and supply agreement, Hologic will use Applied BioCode’s Barcoded Magnetic Beads in conjunction with its Invader chemistry to create multiplexed nucleic acid–based tests for the agriculture market.

In January, ArcticZymes in partnership with Percorso Life Sciences formed a North American subsidiary, which is located in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania.

Merck Millipore is collaborating with Proteomics International to validate 13 protein biomarkers related to kidney disease using its multiplex immunoassays.

ZyGEM signed an OEM agreement with Saudi Diagnostics in January for its DNA and RNA extraction kits.

In February, Synthetic Genomics and Integrated DNA Technologies signed an agreement to manufacture, market and commercialize custom synthetic double-stranded nucleic acids up to 5 kilobases in size.

Product Introductions

SwitchGear Genomics launched the LightSwitch Multiplex Assay Kits for environmental, toxicology and water quality testing.

EMD Millipore introduced the homogenous, no wash, 96-well format SIRTainty Class III HDAC Assay for the detection of sirtuin activity. It employs untagged acetylated peptide substrates for flexibility in the choice of sirtuin isoform and peptide substrate.

BioTime introduced products from five human embryonic stem cell lines from the Reproductive Genetics Institute for use in muscle disorder research.

Bioo Scientific released the D-Pop Kit to facilitate the analysis of apoptotic bodies. It fractionates apoptotic bodies from cell-free fluids in minutes.

MO BIO Laboratories introduced the PowerPlant Pro DNA and PowerPlant RNA Isolation Kits for purification of nucleic acids from plant cells, tissues and seeds.

Integrated DNA Technologies released gBlocks Gene Fragments, which are double-stranded genomic blocks up to 500 base pair in size. They are priced at $99.

In January, DNA2.0 introduced Protein Variant Libraries for the most common methods of protein engineering. The core libraries are: Alanine Scanning, Single Site Saturation, Combinatorial Site and Antibody.

In February, PerkinElmer introduced four new AlphaLISA Epigenetic Cellular Detection Kits for the detection of endogenous modification of epigenetic marks on Histone H3 in a one-well, no wash format.