NEW YORK, Sept. 9 (GenomeWeb News) - Blue Heron Biotechnology has won a Phase I SBIR grant from the National Institute of General Medical Science and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease to develop new tools for cloning genes that are "difficult" to grow in bacteria, the Bothell, Wash.-based company said yesterday.
The amount of the grant was not immediately available from the company, but NIH databases list a one-year grant entitled "High-Copy Number Cloning Of Toxic Genes" that started Aug.1 with $118,223 for fiscal year 2005.
The tools under development will block functional protein expression, thus allowing recombinant plasmids with toxic genes to be propagated in bacteria. Blue Heron plans to use the technologies to improve its GeneMaker gene synthesis service and may make it available as kits to modulate protein expression levels in E. coli.