Product news in brief

LabTechnologist.com brings you its periodic round up of new product releases for use in pharmaceutical and life science laboratories, with new offerings from Invitrogen, Micronit, Nimblegen, Porvair and Qiagen.

Invitrogen has partnered with Cytori Therapeutics to supply adipose-derived stem cell based research products to life science researchers.

"This product offering provides life science researchers access to an important and validated stem cell population," said Dr Joydeep Goswami, vice president of stem cells and regenerative medicine for Invitrogen.

"Adipose derived stem cells represent an attractive cell source from which to conduct regenerative medicine research, and we are excited to enter into this partnership with Cytori, a pioneer in this field."

Micronit Microfluidics has introduced four glass microfluidic mixers that enable the high-quality mixing of fluids in a fraction of a second.

"The demand for efficient micromixers was the key driver for the research we performed on this technology," said Marko Blom, R&D manager at Micronit.

"The introduction of the Micronit standard glass micromixers is a step forward in the application of micromixing in life sciences and chemistry. The use of glass makes the micromixer optically clear and suitable for aggressive chemicals."

Nimblegen has added DNA methylation analysis arrays and services to its genomic and epigenetic analysis tools offerings. The arrays can be used to correlate promoter and genic methylation regions with gene expression as well as detecting differential DNA methylation between normal tissues and tumour samples.

"Comparing the methylation profiles of healthy and diseased cells such as manifested in cancer cells, provides a wealth of information that will be instrumental in deciphering the molecular mechanisms pertaining to DNA methylation and its translation into a biological effect," said Dr Henk Stunnenberg of Radboud University in the Netherlands.

"Such analyses are likely to provide highly valuable novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers that enable tailoring of therapeutic treatment."

Porvair Sciences has launched a new range of 96-well assay plates for adsorption, mixing and storage applications. The plates are compatible with almost all plate readers, robotic sample processors and liquid handling systems.

The plates come in a range of well shapes (flat, round and v-bottomed) and colours (white, black and black/white) as well as offering a tissue culture treated plates for cell growth applications.

Qiagen has launched a new miRNA assay technology, miScript, to provide researchers with a new tool in one of the most rapidly evolving areas of life science research.

"So far, researchers had to create a new copy of the DNA every time they wanted to detect a miRNA molecule," said Dr Constanze Kindler, senior product manager at Qiagen.

"This often leads to inconsistent results and a waste of precious samples, such as cancer and tissue cells. miScript simply makes miRNA detection faster, more economical and convenient."