Articles by Deborah Fitzgerald

Courtesy of PerkinElmer Life and Analytical SciencesBoston-based PerkinElmer Life and Analytical Sciences http://las.perkinelmer.com has introduced the ProXPRESS™ 2D Proteomic Imaging System. A second-generation instrument, the ProXPRESS 2D is "improved with regard to speed, sensitivity, and flexibility," says Alessandra Rasmussen, business unit leader for proteomics and array systems.At the heart of the new imaging system is a CCD camera that offers higher throughput with significantly i

Courtesy of Abbott Laboratories  BETTER LIVING THROUGH IMMUNOLOGY: Though the exact cause of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is unknown, people suffering from the disease have an excess of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-a) that accumulates in their joints. Abbott Laboratories' Humira, a humanized monoclonal antibody that targets TNF-a, helps prevent the inflammation characteristic of RA and inhibits the progression of structural joint damage. As soon as Köhler and Milstein described hyb

Courtesy of Large Scale Biology Agricultural researchers have designed a wide variety of genetically modified plants with traits deemed beneficial to those who grow, market, and consume them. But plants have another role in biotech: Members of the green kingdom also can be used--quite literally-- as manufacturing plants for large-scale, recombinant protein production.1-4 Think GM crops, with a twist. Such proteins have potential industrial, research, and clinical applications. Plant expressi

Courtesy of Thermogenic Imaging  FEEL THE HEAT? Infrared TSA images capture the thermogenic response of the brain and IBAT to oral glucose and insulin in diabetic and non-diabetic BB-rats. Cellular thermogenesis, or heat production, reflects an amalgamation of physiological functions, including metabolic activities and blood flow. Telltale differences in thermogenic patterns can result when an organism's physiological status changes for any of a variety of reasons, including disease prog

Courtesy of Advalytix When it comes to technology, great things really do come in small packages. "Smaller" is usually not only faster, but often better, and more economical. Microfluidic technology, the underlying principle for "lab-on-a-chip" devices, promises reduced sample and reagent consumption, decreased waste, and speedier processing.1,2 The resulting gadgets generally are amenable to the time- and labor-saving fantastic four: automation, integration, modularization, and parallelizatio

Courtesy of Cytokinetics  Ovarian cancer cell line OVCAR3 fixed and stained with fluorescent markers against nuclei, Golgi apparatus, microtubules, and actin. The panels represent the same image color combined in different combinations to highlight different organizational patterns. Founded in 1998, Cytokinetics of South San Francisco, Calif., specializes in discovering, developing, and commercializing small-molecule therapeutic agents that target cytoskeletal proteins. Although the subs

Photo: Courtesy of Eksigent Technologies Eksigent Technologies' electrokinetic high-flow-rate EKPump These days, miniaturization is king. In the emerging field of microfluidics, routine laboratory analyses are shrinking to the microliter, nanoliter, or even picoliter level. The result: a vast reduction in sample and reagent consumption, decreased waste generation, dramatically faster operation, and an incredible potential for the automation and massive, parallel processing of laboratory

Image: Courtesy of Atto Bioscience SHARPER IMAGE: A section of mouse intestine imaged with both confocal and non-confocal microscopy Confocal imaging systems offer a number of improvements over conventional wide-field fluorescent microscopes, including greater spatial resolution and enhanced image quality. Most commercial confocal systems employ laser scanners, but these systems are generally expensive to purchase and maintain. And, because a given laser source can be tuned to emit at on

Image: Courtesy of Amersham Biosciences  THE ESSENCE OF DIGE The most widely used proteomic method, two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2DE), has a number of drawbacks, including low reproducibility and difficulties in quantitatively comparing multiple gels.1 Fluorescence two-dimensional difference gel electro- phoresis (2D DIGE) circumvents the latter problem by combining conventional 2DE with fluorescent labeling, sample multiplexing, and image analysis. Jonathan Minden, professor of

Image: Courtesy of Aclara Biosciences The eTag™ system from ACLARA BioSciences of Mountain View, Calif., enables the multiplexed, solution-phase analysis of proteins and nucleic acids. This technology employs the company's eTag reporters, which are low-molecular weight, fluorescent molecules that are readily separated and quantified by capillary electrophoresis (CE) in conjunction with fluorescence detection using standard capillary DNA sequencers. This method can be used for any applic

Photo: Courtesy of Gene Machines SEEING SPOTS: Microarraying devices automate the task of arraying the hundreds or thousands of samples typically found on biochips. Shown here is Gene Machine's OmniGrid Accent, a contact-based printer with 48 pins that is capable of placing over 100,000 75-µm features on a standard microscope. Today's "big science" is all about high throughput, a concept elegantly epitomized by the DNA microarray. Biochips let researchers analyze the expression of t

Science has entered a new era in which molecules are being used as building blocks, moving parts, and even as electronic components. Biomolecules offer great potential as component parts because nature has already done much of the work; their very shapes and chemical makeup encode a variety of exploitable functions, including binding, catalysis, pumping, and self-assembly.2 A case in point: Science magazine hailed the first molecular-scale circuits as 2001's "Breakthrough of the Year."1 Researc

Founded in July 2001, Adaptive Screening Ltd. (ASL) of Cambridge, UK, is developing several miniaturized drug-profiling platforms. "Advances in high-throughput technologies coupled with the 'genomics explosion' have transferred the bottlenecks in drug discovery from compound synthesis and target identification to hit-to-lead profiling and target validation," comments Tony Cass, professor of chemical biology at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London, and one of ASL's c

Invitrogen Corp. of Carlsbad, Calif., offers TOPO® Tools for those interested in an alternative to conventional, time-consuming cloning techniques. TOPO Tools provide a relatively fast way of joining various sequence elements, such as promoters and tags, to either or both ends of a PCR-amplified product, without traditional cloning procedures such as ligations, vector manipulations, or Escherichia coli transformation. Rather, this method harnesses the dual catalytic activities of Vaccinia t

Expression genomics and proteomics approaches have provided important insights into the roles of specific genes and proteins. Now, researchers monitoring other components of living organisms are finding ways to adapt the "big picture" outlook characteristic of these disciplines to their own work. For example, Lipomics Technologies Inc. of West Sacramento, Calif., is developing methods and tools to simultaneously quantify lipid metabolites on a large scale. As with other types of comprehensive an