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

Years ago, researchers organized their references on index cards, and citation management described the organization of these cards--and by extension, the references that they referred to--so that scientists could find specific papers as needed. Unfortunately, this system suffered from a number of drawbacks. Searching the "database" was a manual chore, and finding a reference without knowing the author or the indexing keyword was nearly impossible, as was finding every paper with a given word in

Microfluidics, the science that underlies technologies for manipulating minute volumes of liquids, is the new buzzword in biology-and with good reason. Microfluidics has the potential to revolutionize the way routine molecular biology experiments are carried out. This technology is being used to miniaturize biological separation and assay techniques so that entire experiments can be accomplished within diminutive devices that are about as large as a computer chip. Picoliter-to-nanoliter volumes

The use of synthetic peptides in life science research is growing as researchers in a wide variety of disciplines find applications for these reagents. Many of these peptides are easily produced by automated peptide synthesis, which enables the economic and relatively easy production of peptides in large quantities. As a result, many widely used, biologically active peptides are commercially available as pre-made catalog reagents.1 But when experimental approaches call for peptides that are not

DNA array-based technologies are widely used in biological research, most commonly to measure differential gene expression--that is, comparing the relative levels of RNA transcripts in different cell or tissue samples.1,2 In a common scenario, researchers label cDNA targets prepared from control and experimental samples with two different fluorescent dyes. They then hybridize these two samples simultaneously to a single microarray bearing tens of thousands of oligonucleotide probes. Finally, the

Click to view the PDF file: Suppliers of Integrin-Related Reagents Courtesy of Rick HorwitzReprinted with permission from the Journal of Cell BiologyPaxillin-GFP in WI38 human fibroblast cells showing paxillin turnover as cells migrate. The image is an overlay of 2 separate time points. Editor's note: A group of scientists led by M. Amin Arnaout at Massachusetts General Hospital published the first crystal structure of the human integrin aVb3 extracellular domain, on September 9, 2001.(www.sc

Click to view the PDF file: Suppliers of Flow Cytometers with Cell Sorting Capabilities Courtesy of CytomationCytomation's MoFlo MLS, capable of sorting 100,000 cells/second. Flow cytometers equipped with cell sorters enable the isolation of highly purified cell (or other particle) subpopulations. Unlike bulk separation methods, flow cytometry-based purification is on a "per particle" basis. Each particle is classified based on any of a number of different properties prior to sorting. In this

Click to view the PDF file: Bead-based Fluorescent Multiplex Protein Analysis Systems Courtesy of LINCO ResearchLabMAP-based systems use internally dyed fluorescent microspheres to analyze as many as 100 different analytes concurrently. Today's competitive, high-paced research environment has stimulated the development of a host of approaches for rapid, cost-efficient analyses of large numbers of samples. In keeping with this trend, methods for simultaneously analyzing multiple species in a g

If the expression products of a large number of different genes need to be rapidly analyzed, for instance during functional genomic research, consider the Transcriptionally Active PCR (TAP) Express™ Rapid Gene Expression kit from Gene Therapy Systems (GTS) Inc. of San Diego. TAP Express is the first commercially available system for the construction of transcriptionally active PCR fragments that can be expressed in mammalian cells. In this approach, researchers use nested PCR to generate t

The "sister" Web sites MicroscopyU (www.microscopyu.com) and Molecular Expressions (www.microscopy.fsu.edu) were developed for those interested in microscopy and related topics. Michael Davidson, a senior research engineering support specialist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory of Tallahassee, Fla., explains, "we have been working on Molecular Expressions for five and a half years at a total cost of just over $2 million. The Web site has about 6,000 pages with 1,500 pages in various