Articles by Jasmin Chua

The cells in our body are continually replaced, especially those exposed to the harsher environments of the skin or intestine.

Courtesy of QiagenLooking for a way to isolate a nucleic acid and don't know where to start? The availability of options is the least of your worries. Whatever your particular sample source, throughput requirement, or scale, odds are good that somebody has a system available to help.The sea of options is vast, and lucrative. Analysts predict that the rapidly growing nucleic acid isolation market may generate revenues reaching nearly $500 million by 2009.1 According to Frost & Sullivan, a mar

Courtesy of Allometra Davis, Calif.-based Allometra has released software that will appeal to biologists and personal finance aficionados alike. Based on an algorithm that converts numerical data to color values, PyMood can display any kind of data, from yeast proteins to bank statements, in two- and three-dimensional space using up to one million colors, says Marta Matviemko, Allometra's founder and CEO. But its main function is to display the results of BLAST outputs. "The majority of our c

Chunkier Chips Courtesy of Affymetrix A new GeneChip® brand CustomExpress array launched by Santa Clara, Calif.-based Affymetrix raises the bar for gene expression arrays with its ability to measure up to 61,000 transcripts, a three-fold increase from the company's previous standard of 23,000 probe sets. The new array contains 1.3 million individual features, a density Affymetrix achieved by reducing the array's feature size from 18 microns to 11 microns. This new data capacity makes t

Protein Rainbow Previously available by license only, Palo Alto, Calif.-based BD Biosciences-Clontech is now offering academic and nonprofit researchers access to its collection of novel reef coral fluorescent proteins, which include AmCyan1, ZsGreen1, ZsYellow1, DsRed2, AsRed2, and HcRed1. These six spectrally distinct proteins, encoded on both bacterial and mammalian expression vectors, range from cyan, green, and yellow to three shades of red. Engineered to optimize brightness and increas

Courtesy of Invitrogen Two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE) has come under fire for its lack of reproducibility, low throughput, and exclusion of low-abundance proteins. Carlsbad, Calif.-based Invitrogen recently developed a workaround with its ZOOM™ IEF Fractionator System to enhance low-abundance protein detection. Designed to fractionate samples by isoelectric point prior to 2-DE, 1-DE, or 2-D liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry, the fractionator device employs precast, bu

Courtesy of Protometrix The first proteome microarray is nearing release, but the Branford, Conn., company, Protometrix, is keeping the details on under wraps. Targeted for release at the end of the year, the yeast ProtoArray™, says company president and CEO Hollis Kleinert, will change the face of the genomic marketplace, taking the ability to get more specific information on drug efficacy and profiling "to an entirely new level." Protometrix's yeast ProtoArray, its first, is based on

Courtesy of Zyomyx Hayward, Calif.-based Zyomyx released its Protein Profiling Biochip System and a compatible array for human cytokines in February. Consisting of the Assay 1200™ automated workstation, the Scanner 100™ biochip reader, data analysis software, and validated biochips, the platform facilitates high-speed, parallel analyses of multiple proteins--an improvement over traditional techniques such as Western blotting. Nearly four years in the making, the company's first pr