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Active Motif Acquires SwitchGear Genomics

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Active Motif announced Thursday that it has acquired privately held genomics tools maker SwitchGear Genomics for an undisclosed price.

SwitchGear was founded by a group of Stanford University scientists in 2006 and is based in Menlo Park, Calif. It developed the LightSwitch Reporter Assay System, which includes over 30,000 endogenous 3' UTR and promoter luciferase reporters, validated biomarkers, miRNA target validation sets, synthetic response elements, and optimized luciferase assay reagents to study gene regulation in living cells.

Carlsbad, Calif.-based Active Motif develops epigenetics-based research tools for analyzing nuclear function.

"There is a strong scientific connection between epigenetics and gene regulation, and the combination of our technologies will create some very exciting possibilities for our customers," Active Motif CEO Joe Fernandez said in a statement. He added that SwitchGear "has a unique combination of expertise in computational regulatory element identification, experimental validation, and data analysis that offers the scientist new and innovative high-throughput tools for studying regulatory element function across the genome."

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