In June of 2006 Allerca announced it would start selling the "world?s first scientifically-proven" hypoallergenic cats. Allerca's scientific evidence regarding its hypoallergenic cats consists of a press release of a clinical trial, and a DNA gel and a Western blot on its website. On November 30 Simon Brodie emailed The Scientist's staff writer Kerry Grens an additional piece of data: the abstract of a genetic analysis conducted on cheek swab samples Allerca sent to a company in Tennessee called Microbac. Robert Brooks, the biotechnology manager at Microbac, performed the analysis in May, June and July 2006. Microbac's analysis did not examine whether the different amino acid sequence among Allerca's samples translate into a hypoallergenic cat.
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