NEW YORK, Feb 27 – Applied Biosystems has officially launched its isotope-coded affinity tagging reagent technology for proteomics and will begin shipping the ICAT kits in March, the company said Tuesday.
ICAT reagents facilitate comparison and analysis of proteins in diseased and healthy tissue. They work by tagging cysteine peptides of proteins in different tissue samples with differently weighted isotopes of a molecule.
After the proteins are tagged, an enzyme then chops them up into fragments, and the protein fragments are analyzed using a mass spectrometer. The ones tagged with a heavier isotope show a larger mass when put through the mass spectrometer, enabling researchers to distinguish which proteins are expressed in the different samples.
These reagents, developed by Ruedi Aebersold of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and exclusively licensed by ABI in November, are designed to be more sensitive to lower quantities of protein than 2d gels, and provide more accurate information about the quantities of protein in a given sample.
“We are pleased to make this technology available to our customers because it represents a major advance in the field of proteomics,” Josif Malandrakis, general manager of PerSeptive Biosystems division of ABI, said in a statement. “ICAT reagents enable researchers to quantitate and identify a broad range of proteins including important membrane and low-abundance proteins.”
ABI made the ICAT reagents available to Geneva Proteomics in late November under an early access agreement. The company did not release pricing information on the reagents.