Personal Chain Reaction Blog

In the past few years a “new” PCR technique has come into the scientific community, it is known as digital PCR (or dPCR, for us acronym loving scientists).  I thought it worth discussing some of the details of the utility of dPCR for those of you out there that are just getting into the real-time PCR world or those considering the transition to this new technique.

What is dPCR, it is basically a means to do hundreds, thousands, and possibly millions of tiny PCR amplifications from a single sample.  Why would you want to do this, might be your first question?  … Continue Reading

Go figure, antibiotic resistance is cropping up everywhere we look.  Of course, that begs the question..are we just looking more?

I bet, in part, that the answer is yes.

Here is brief list from just the last two weeks: HIV , E. coli, Fungi, Malaria,  Cancer, and the list goes on and keeps growing.

Signal Diagnostics, a spin out of Fluoresentric,  has developed a … Continue Reading

Fluoresentric’s team of scientists are all on some sort of social network..there is Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and now also Scribd, and although these are terrific places to share pictures, or comment about the day’s activities.  When it comes to biology news, or DNA news item, or even just some basic science articles..often those other business networks and personal social networks don’t seem like the right place to post your thoughts or have a discussion..that is why we created Personal Chain Reaction, a science social network for molecular scientists. Don’t read that wrong..in my opinion..just … Continue Reading

10 years ago, I was in the oligonucleotide manufacturing business.  At the time, I was the director of a small enterprise that specialized in real-time PCR fluorescently labeled probes, and their cognate primer sets.  Our specialty was in Roche Hybridization Probe® and SimpleProbe®, and ABI TaqMan® chemistries.    At that time we were a premium priced producer of these oligonucleotides, primarily because we were the best in the market.

In the last 10 years the real time pcr primer, and real time fluorescent probe market has expanded to a huge number of lower and lower priced vendors.  Each of them offer … Continue Reading

So on the Pro-Med update pages today, I read about a nasty little disease that we have been selling a genotype screening assay to assist in the management of sheep flocks in the Western United States for the past 7 years.

You can check out our publication on this product on the Fluoresentric home page.

More than 10 years ago, Fluoresentric developed a new 10x real-time PCR buffer that at the time was simply an inexpensive way for our lab to do it’s own research and development work.

Over these past 10 years of being in the real-time PCR assay development business and having worked on projects from quantitiative PCR, to genotyping, and from 1-step reverse transcription PCR to self-contained sample preparation and amplification instruments with freeze dried reaction mixes we have found that our very simple buffer system works well, if not superior, for just about any reaction that … Continue Reading

Okay, so summertime is nearly upon us.  Well that is the theory at least.  Still, this is my favorite time of year.  Trips to Utah are relatively inexpensive, which makes now the ideal time to stop by our labs for one or two days and spend some time with the Real-time PCR experts at Fluoresentric learning some cool new instrumentation,  reaction set-up techniques,  or some theory behind kinetic amplification in our Real-time PCR Training Course – Basic.  If you can stay for another day, we even tackle some of the more esoteric probe chemistries, and assay design techniques in … Continue Reading

Sure isolating DNA from bacteria isn’t a big deal..right? So why fuss over it?  Simple, it is a big deal if you are trying to isolate DNA from almost any bacteria that isn’t your run-of-the-mill lab strain, grown under ideal conditions, with low levels of reaction inhibitors already present.

When dealing with real bacterial samples, from real environmental or in-vivo settings the trouble begins and simple preparation chemistries just don’t break open those cells as expected nor is the resultant DNA really ready for any sort of PCR test, let alone real-time PCR.

That is if your extraction system isn’t Fluoresentric’s … Continue Reading

We at Fluoresentric often have customers ask us to develop a nice gene expression assay, and then they find that their gene is either up- or down-regulated by the treatments they are applying.  At least that is what the reference gene vs the target gene data indicate. So they have a some indication that the amount of RNA being made has changed.

As a trained enzymologist I know that just because there is more or less RNA doesn’t necessarily mean that the final biochemical product concentration is altered within the cell.  Enzyme and RNA quantities may not be the limiting … Continue Reading

Sample preparation of DNA and RNA for use in real-time or conventional PCR diagnostic testing has evolved dramatically in the past several years.  The goal of this evolution has been to be able to take a cellular sample (cheek, nasopharyngeal, blood, or culture) and rapidly isolate the nucleic acids that are going to be detected by amplification chemistry (PCR, RT-PCR, Dynamic Flux Amplfication, etc.); the problem has been that many of these evolved techniques provide either the DNA or the RNA but not both, and that is where Direct-2-PCR has taken the evolution of sample prep.

Fluoresentric’s … Continue Reading