GT’s December 2000 issue cover story asked if ABI’s MALDI TOF/TOF mass-spec instrument would be key to Celera’s success in proteomics. A year later, it’s still unclear whether the instrument will live up to its promised throughput.
Scott Patterson, who has since been appointed vice president for proteomics at Celera, has installed a platform that combines a liquid chromatography-based approach for separating proteins with the MALDI TOF/TOF. Patterson recently told ProteoMonitor editor John MacNeil: “I think we had targets and milestones which we set and we’re meeting those.” What exactly were those milestones? Patterson declines to say.
A feature article in the same issue asked, “What the Heck is Hyseq Up To?” The answer, in part, was “fighting a patent dispute with Affymetrix.” At the time, Hyseq chairman George Rathmann told GT that resolving that battle was on his short list. Looks like he can check that one off: In late October, Affy and Hyseq announced that they had dropped their weapons and, of all things, formed a joint venture. What’s more, it appears that Radoje Drmanac’s persistence paid off. The inventor of Hyseq’s sequencing by hybridization technology will now head up a spinoff, Callida Genomics, that will, among other things, attempt to commercialize a high-speed DNA sequencing chip.