Under the terms of the alliance, Applied Biosystems and Invitrogen will re-sell a combined suite of labelling technologies consisting of Applied Biosystems' proprietary suite of protein and peptide labeling technologies - iTRAQ and ICAT reagents - and Invitrogen's newly launched SILAC metabolomic labelling system.
Applied Biosystems will also provide software support for SILAC on its TOF/TOF family of products, including the newly launched 4800 MALDI TOF/TOF Analyzer, and plans to extend software support for the SILAC labelling technology to other Applied Bio/MDS SCIEX protein mass spectrometry systems.
Together, these technologies and products can provide biological insights from comparing relative protein expression levels between diseased and normal samples ranging from cell culture lines to tissues and serum.
"The alliance with Invitrogen brings together the capabilities of two leaders in their respective fields to deliver improved solutions for proteomics and enable biologists to further elucidate cellular pathways that are implicated in disease. We believe that this alliance will expand the use of our mass spectrometry labelling reagents within the biologist community," said Catherine Burzik, president of Applied Bio.
"The alliance provides great potential to develop, market, and sell additional reagent products optimised on Applied Biosystems/MDS SCIEX mass spectrometry systems," she added.
Applied Bio's ICAT reagents, introduced in 2001, represented the first quantitative labelling strategy for protein expression analysis using LC/MS approaches (ESI and MALDI) with a specific focus on quantifying only proteins that contained the amino acid cysteine. The firm's iTRAQ reagents are used by researchers to label all peptides, leading to broader protein and proteome coverage with the ability to detect post-translational modifications, and to simultaneously measure expression profiles of up to four samples, such as normal versus diseased versus drug-treated states in a single experiment.
In proteomics, these reagents tend to be used in experiments such as time course studies or expression profiling studies for putative biomarkers.
Meantime, Invitrogen's SILAC technology provides a tool for quantitative analysis of differential protein expression. For example, researchers can view metabolic changes in different cell lines to compare normal versus diseased versus drug-treated cells.