Close may be good enough for horseshoes and hand grenades, but analyzing proteins requires hard numbers. So Boston-based PerkinElmer Life and Analytical Sciences created its new ProScanArray and ScanArray GX slide scanners for precise protein analysis.
"You only need to know whether DNA is regulated up or down," says Sandra Rasmussen, the company's business manager for functional genomics and proteomics. "But protein analysis requires the exact quantity of the proteins present in the sample." The company's new systems not only include algorithms that make those precise calculations, but "they also reduce variability so you can be sure of the same answer when you run variations on the same analysis a month later," she adds.
Besides enabling researchers to derive hard numbers, the new software improves "spot-finding" so that the scanners find and read slide's "sweet spot" more fully accurately. Also, the new instruments shorten the laser light's path from source ...
