NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Life Technologies and Douglas Scientific today announced a collaboration aimed at high-throughput genotyping.
Under the terms of the deal, Douglas' Array Tape platform will be optimized for Life Tech's TaqMan SNP Genotyping Assays. The combination of the two technologies will allow customers to generate hundreds of thousands of data points each day, the firms said.
"With preset protocols and optimized instrumentation, our customers will realize their throughput and economic goals while experiencing improvements in efficiency and data quality," Douglas President and COO Dan Malmstrom said in a statement.
The collaboration is particularly beneficial to the plant agricultural biotechnology and animal breeding industries that conduct marker-assisted selection experiments and require genetic selection methods in order to keep pace with the global food demands, Life Tech and Douglas said, adding that the combination of the companies' technologies will also benefit other applications, including drug discovery research, that require industrial-scale genotyping.
"The high throughput capacity of the Array Tape system is highly complementary to our real-time PCR portfolio, and in particular, our TaqMan Assays," Chris Linthwaite, head of Genetic Analysis at Life Technologies, said. "Customers around the world can now leverage a complete solution for high-throughput genotyping — from sample prep to TaqMan Assays and the Array Tape system, which together offer the industry’s highest quality solution at the affordable cost and high throughput they need."
The Array Tape is a flexible microplate replacement for high-throughput screening, consisting of a continuous polypropylene strip serially embossed with reaction wells in customized volumes and formats. The TaqMan SNP Genotyping Assays are designed for detecting and quantifying genetic variations in DNA samples associated with phenotypes of interest.