NextGen unveils products in Europe
it maintains have the potential to revolutionise protein research
and accelerate drug discovery.
NextGen Sciences of the UK has launched two new technologies - an automated 2D gel electropheresis system and a high-throughput protein expression platform - that it maintains have the potential to revolutionise protein research and accelerate drug discovery.
The first product, a2DE, is claimed to be the first fully-automated 2-dimensional electropheresis system in the world that can run gels without the need for user supervision or intervention.
NextGen's commercial director, Dr Grant Cameron, unveiled the machine to a European audience at last month's Proteomics Forum in Munich, Germany. US researchers were introduced to the system first at the Drug Discovery Technology meeting earlier this year.
Dr Cameron told the meeting that 2D electrophoresis is the most widely used separations method in protein research, and is thought of as the gold standard for protein separation. However, despite its popularity, the technique has undergone few improvements in the last 30 years.
"The a2DE is set to change this, allowing protein researchers to spend time analysing their results, rather than trying to achieve them," he said, adding that the a2DE has been designed specifically to minimise hands-on time, increase reproducibility, simplify the technique and optimise results.
The second of NextGen Sciences' technologies is the expressionfactory, a platform for systematic, automated and high throughput protein expression and purification.
The expressionfactory platform combines biology, hardware and software tools that enable the entire process of expression vector construction, protein expression and subsequent purification to be automated. The result is the systematic and parallel production of many hundreds of purified proteins with minimal hands-on time, according to NextGen.
To produce samples of protein fit for their purpose, protein researchers may have to try many different combinations of vector construction, hosts used to express the protein, growth conditions for each host and different purification strategies. Due to the numbers of proteins and different optimisation steps involved, this quickly becomes a sequence, sample and protein-tracking problem, the expressionfactory incorporates software to cope with it, as well as to control the automation hardware and provide a complete audit trail from gene to protein.
For more information on the a2DE and expressionfactory systems, contact Grant Cameron, NextGen's European Commercial Director:
