Pairings
Katherine Webster has joined 454 Life Sciences as vice president for measurement services center sales, a newly created position, the company said this week.
Webster was most recently president of Biotage, Biosystems Division, where she oversaw the company's sales and marketing efforts into R&D. She has also held positions at Applied Biosystems, Chemdex, Celera Genomics, AnVil Informatics, and Molecular Staging.
PerkinElmer has appointed Aaron Geist vice president, business development, the company announced last week.
Geist was formerly director and senior research analyst at Robert W. Baird. He has a PhD in microbiology and molecular virology from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and BS degrees in genetics and biology from the University of Western Ontario.
Emily Winn-Deen, a vice president of Cepheid, received the 2006 award for outstanding contributions to clinical chemistry through science and technology by the Northern California section of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, Cepheid announced this week.
Winn-Deen was selected for her contributions to advancing molecular diagnostics, the company said.
Agilent Technologies has named Helen Stimson vice president and general manager of global consumables for the company's life sciences and chemical analysis business, Agilent said this week.
Stimson is a 24-year veteran of Agilent and Hewlett-Packard. She was previously global consumables business program manager.
New Releases
Stratagene this week launched its PfuUltra II Fusion HS DNA polymerase and its Herculase II Fusion DNA polymerase, both of which offer improved yield, reliability, and run times compared to many high-fidelity enzymes, the company said in a statement.
The PfuUltra II Fusion HS polymerase can decrease the run time of a 10-hour PCR reaction to 2 hours, while the Herculase II Fusion DNA polymerase produces a yield as great as 10-fold better than other high-yield enzymes, the company said. Stratagene recommends its new Herculase enzyme for the amplification of difficult targets and GC-rich sequences.
Premier Biosoft International this week released its AlleleID version 2.00 software for designing microarrays and qPCR diagnostic assays for rapid pathogen detection in applications such as environmental monitoring, surveillance, and biodiversity studies. The assays can be designed to detect only the strain or species of interest, or AlleleID can design them to identify conserved regions of related organisms, the company said. The software also offers taxon-specific designs for studies, such as the effects of contaminants, and it supports. qPCR chemistries such as SYBR Green, TaqMan, FRET probes and beacons for allele discrimination, as well as multiplex and immunoassays, the company added.
Bio-Rad released its iQ multiplex powermix for PCR this week, a reagent mix for simplifying real-time detection of multiple targets in a single tube, the company said. The mix eliminates the need to optimize buffer, enzyme, and primer concentrations in order to amplify as many as five targets with equal efficiency. According to the company, the mix produces linearity over six orders of magnitude of input cDNA and four orders of magnitude of input genomic DNA