Company Announcements

Boreal Genomics named Nitin Sood CEO in June. He was most recently general manager of Agilent Life Sciences’ Automation Group.

Roche and Caliper Life Sciences announced in July a comarketing agreement for the development and optimization of automated protocols for their respective NimbleGen SeqCap EZ Library and Sciclone next-generation sequencing (NGS) Workstation.

In July, Perfinity Biosciences named Robert H. Ellis, former CEO of Biotrove, to its Board.

In August, BGI and Diagenode announced a collaboration for the implementation of standard methods in epigenetics and NGS sample preparation.

Under an exclusive codevelopment and supply agreement, Advanced Liquid Logic will provide instrumentation, software and digital microfluidic cartridge technology to NuGEN Technologies for commercialization under the Mondrian SP name, with an initial focus on NGS library preparation for Illumina sequencing.

Product Introductions

Denator introduced the Stabilizer Peptide Extraction Kit, which enables users to heat stabilize, homogenize and extract endogenous peptides from tissue samples.

Microfluidica launched the Mobile Chemistry Analyzer for automation of in-line sample preparation procedures for the analysis of chemical species in water.

PerkinElmer launched in June the Supra-Clean silica-based and Supra-Poly polymer-based SPE product lines, which includes small and large column sizes.

NuGEN Technologies released the Encore 384 Multiplex System for NGS sample preparation, which provides multiplexing of up to 384 uniquely coded libraries.

In July, Beckman Coulter Genomics introduced a high-capacity, target capture sequencing service, which utilizes Agilent SureSelect Target Enrichment technology and Beckman’s SPRIworks Fragment Library System and Biomek Laboratory Automation Workstation. Sequencing is performed on Illumina platforms.

Illumina introduced in July the TruSeq Custom Enrichment kits for targeting genomic regions of interests ranging from 700 Kb to 15 Mb of cumulative DNA. Also released was the online DesignStudio tool for custom probe design.

Claremont BioSolutions launched the HisExpress disposable columns for His-tagged protein purification in less than three minutes.

In August, Horizon Technology introduced the modular and scalable SmartPrep Extractor for cartridge-based automated SPE. Individual methods can be selected for each sample or for up to 96 samples in batch mode.

Phenomenex launched the Strata-X Drug N, an SPE sorbent specially designed for the extraction of neutral drugs in forensic toxicology.