Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT) announced today a minority investment by growth equity investor Summit Partners. IDT’s founder, Dr. Joseph Walder, will remain the company’s majority owner. Additional terms of the investment were not disclosed.

IDT is the world’s largest manufacturer of custom nucleic acid products. The company supplies scientists with synthetic DNA and RNA sequences, serving the academic research, biotechnology, clinical diagnostics, and pharmaceutical sectors. IDT develops innovative products while providing unmatched product value, excellent delivery times, and personalized customer service....

The project will be funded EUR 900K (USD 1.25 M) in total by the Belgian Walloon region and the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC)

Promethera(R) Biosciences, a company that develops innovative therapies for the treatment of liver diseases, today announces a collaboration with EMD Millipore to develop an improved ready-to-use microfluidic perfusion liver assay. This new product is designed to perform more robust studies in pre-clinical toxicity and drug metabolism. Early availability of reliable human liver-based assays is critical to the pharmaceutical industry when deciding to bring a lead compound in clinical phase development....

In response to the superbug red alert warning raised by England's main public health body, a UK firm has detailed a range of support measures that are effective against CPE.

Carbapenemase-producing enterobacteriaceae (or CPE) has outgrown the term ‘superbug’ due to the highly limited treatment options available. Such is the level of concern that the pathogen has been called “a national health threat” by NHS officials. To combat this threat Public Health England (PHE) has issued a toolkit to help NHS trusts combat CPE. And the UK's leading experts in tackling the superbug menace have now developed a range of solutions to support the implementation of two key areas of this toolkit: environmental decontamination and patient isolation...

Promising results for the maintenance of motor function in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) - a rare, serious and debilitating pediatric-onset neurodegenerative disease  

Trophos today announces that top-line results from a pivotal clinical trial of its lead product candidate olesoxime in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) show a beneficial effect on the maintenance of motor function in SMA patients. If approved, olesoxime could be the first treatment specifically developed for SMA patients. SMA is an autosomal recessive genetic disease that affects the motor neurons of the voluntary muscles used for activities such as crawling, walking, head and neck control and swallowing....

This month, Priorclave’s new web site went live and reflects the company’s up-front policy of providing would-be autoclave purchasers with facts and figures that will steer them easily to identify the best possible steam steriliser for their application. 

The selection process begins right on the Home Page where answering a few key questions on the Product Finder, guides users to the most appropriate Priorclave available and within a given budget. Priorclave is firmly established as a global autoclave supplier, success built around its in-house assets of strong design credentials and modern manufacturing facility coupled with rigorous test and calibration centre....

Exeter Analytical Inc. has announced how their Model 440 CHN Elemental Analyzer is being widely used to determine the suitability of a waste material for use as a fuel in waste to energy plants.

Following the launch of the new m-VROCi, Viscometer/Rheometer On a Chip, at Pittcon 2014, Malvern Instruments will focus on the unique technology of this system and the considerable benefits it delivers in a webinar on 16 April 2014. The m-VROCi provides safe, accurate viscosity measurement for low viscosity industrial fluids, under conditions that reflect those that apply during end-product use.

AMSBIO Lipidure®-Coat low adhesion plates and dishes are shown in cited research to be one of the most effective tools for state-of-the-art 3D spheroid cell culture.  These new plates and dishes are available in 384-well format optimised for drug screening or other high throughput applications.

Spheroid cell culture is based on the spontaneous formation of an aggregation of cells in an environment where the interactions between cells are superior to the interactions between cells and substrate. This can be achieved by using low-adhesion cell culture conditions. Lipidure®-Coat surfaces use MPC (2-methacryloyloxtethyl phosphorylcholine), a biocompatible synthetic polymer with the same structure as the phosphorylcholine polar bases that form cell membranes. As a consequence of the high biocompatibility of this coating, cells will not adhere to the surface of Lipidure®-Coat plates or dishes...

The Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London (UK) has elected to use a FLIR Systems X6540sc thermal imaging camera to conduct innovative heat transfer experiments on thin-film flows.

Resolve Optics Ltd. reports that it has supplied a number of non-browning zoom lens to Custom Cameras Ltd (Wells, UK) to enable the company to supply fully integrated radiation tolerant camera systems for monitoring applications in the Nuclear industry.

Chemistry engineering specialists Vapourtec (Suffolk, UK) has seen its flagship R-Series flow chemistry system reach a notable milestone with global sales recently reaching the 200 mark. 

The R-Series has a wide range of applications and is already used around the world by many major companies including BP, Pfizer, GSK, Sanofi, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson. The 200^th system was purchased by the University of Manitoba, based at Winnipeg in Canada. Assistant Professor Geoff Tranmer PhD from their Faculty of Pharmacy is no stranger to Vapourtec’s technology having first used the R-Series system whilst at CambridgeUniversity in 2006....

JPK Instruments reports on the study of how force regulates the structures and conformational dynamics of biomacromolecules using AFM-based single molecule force spectroscopy.

JPK Instruments, a world-leading manufacturer of nanoanalytic instrumentation for research in life sciences and soft matter, reports on the study of how force regulates the structures and conformational dynamics of biomacromolecules using AFM-based single molecule force spectroscopy, a project of Professor Yi Cao of Nanjing University. Professor Yi Cao is a member of the Institute of Biophysics located in the Physics Department of Nanjing University....

New class of drug could curb antibiotic resistance, study suggests 

A new type of drug could help to combat growing antibiotic resistance, a study finds. Medicines that stop bacteria from harming their hosts, rather than kill them, could prevent bugs from evolving resistance to drug treatments, a review of research in the field suggests. Scientists have found that anti-virulence (AV) drugs - which work in a different way to antibiotics - could help curb bacteria's growing resistance to antibiotic treatments. Current treatments for infections aim to kill bacteria or stop them from growing, but this can drastically alter how the bugs evolve, and aid the survival of resistant strains...

High Performance Unit Supports Full Range of Common Tubes

Designed for applications that use common, disposable conical tubes, JA-14.50 rotors from Beckman Coulter Life Sciences extend the applications and flexibility of the company’s Avanti centrifuge series, and can be used inAvanti J-26S, J-30I and J-E centrifuges.  While greater capacity results in higher throughput, the rotors maintain the precision performance offered by products in the Avanti line and are the only high-performance rotors capable of spinning 50, 15, 5 and 1.5 mL conical tubes, and 50, 15 and 10 mL round bottom tubes and bottles at their maximum speeds...

Brooks invests $4 million into BioCision to build strategic alignment in biobanking and sample handling to address global challenges in temperature control and standardization

Enteroviruses are a diverse group of RNA viruses including Poliovirus, Rhinoviruses, Coxsackie A & B viruses, and Echoviruses.

Most are acquired via the fecal-oral route and exhibit symptomologies from the common cold and conjunctivitis to myocarditis, sepsis and flaccid paralysis. The most recently discovered members of this genus are now just numbered such as EV68, EV70, EV71 etc. ViroStat has just released a broadly reactive monoclonal antibody that reacts with many of these viruses. This new pan-reactive monoclonal antibody is positive for all 27 Enteroviruses tested to-date....

A new report published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases on 20 March 2014, is the first to release data on total antibiotic consumption for countries outside the European Union (EU).

The data (from 2011) indicate an almost fourfold difference between the lowest and the highest antibiotic users among 42 countries and regions in the WHO European Region (within and outside the EU), and provide a clear picture of the use of different groups of antibiotics. “Antibiotic overuse and misuse are the most important factors in creating resistance. That is why mapping consumption is the first step in identifying and tackling this growing public health problem,” says Ms Zsuzsanna Jakab, WHO Regional Director for Europe. “As antibiotic resistance respects no borders, the work we are doing in the non-EU part of the Region adds enormous value to existing EU data and action...

Emory’s Professor Madhuri Hegde to discuss OGT’s new molecular arrays at ACMG 2014

Oxford Gene Technology (OGT), The Molecular Genetics Company, has expanded its range of research-validated CytoSure Molecular Arrays to investigate DNA copy number variation (CNV) underlying a variety of genetic disorders. Designed and optimised in collaboration with experts at Emory Genetics Laboratory (EGL; Atlanta, USA), the arrays are the ideal complement to DNA sequencing, providing a particularly powerful tool for investigating the variety of aberrations underlying genetic disorders. Professor Madhuri Hegde, Professor of Human Genetics at Emory University School of Medicine, will discuss the design and application of these arrays at the American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) meeting on Thursday 27 March 2014...

Porvair Sciences reports on positive commentary by researchers in published papers citing how using the fast, sensitive ChromaTrap™ Chromatin Immunoprecipitation (ChIP) technology has benefited their research.

In a paper by C.R Williams et al (Am J Physiol Cell Physiol 303: C213–C223, 2012) - Chromatrap was used to assess the occupation of NFkB p65 onto the Nox4 promoter in human aortic endothelial cells which had been treated with normal and high glucose. ChIP data using Chromatrap pro A spin columns demonstrated that in high glucose concentrations NfkB binding to the Nox4 promoter was increased when compared to normal glucose concentrations and rosiglitazone attenuated NfkB binding to the promoter. Their findings illustrated that NFkB/p65-Nox4 axis as an important target of rosigliatzone in vascular endothelial cells following hyperglycemia...

Albuquerque team designs unique, high-speed hyperspectral microscope to visualise membrane receptor dynamics at the molecular level in living cells                                                     

A unique hyperspectral microscope (HSM) designed specifically to visualise molecular-level protein-protein interactions in living cells has been unveiled recently by the University of Albuquerque. Designed around an Andor iXon 860 high-speed EMCCD detection system to record these profoundly challenging nanometer-scale events, the microscope delivers an unprecedented combination of speed, sensitivity and spectral detection. The novel design of the HSM provides acquisition rates of 27 fps over a 28 square micrometre field of view with each pixel collecting 128 spectral channels, allowing the determination of stoichiometry and dynamics of small oligomers unmeasurable by any other technique...

Sequence and application flexibility allow for the exploration of CRISPR and Cas9 function

Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT), the world leader in oligonucleotide synthesis, advances CRISPR research with the use of its gBlocks Gene Fragments. Detailed online in the latest issue of DECODED, CRISPRs can be used in conjunction with CRISPR associated (Cas) proteins, for example Cas9 has been well documented, to recognize and cleave complementary DNA. This mechanism, which is found naturally within bacteria and archaea to protect cells from foreign sequence, has been harnessed for use in genome editing.

Early May provides two opportunities to meet with the Freeman Technology team and learn how the latest advances in powder testing can help solve processing and handling problems.