NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Biosearch Technologies today said that it has acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to continuing Stellaris RNA FISH-based inventions from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
The Stellaris technology has been extended to directly and quantitatively detect chromosomal diseases resulting from translocations and aberrant splice junctions and SNPs, as well as single-molecule detection of mRNA, long non-coding RNA, and viral RNAs, Biosearch said.
The deal is an extension of a licensing deal that Biosearch and UMDNJ inked in 2010.
Financial and other terms were not disclosed.
"[F]or the first time, and in the same reaction, researchers and clinicians can simultaneously perform gene expression and chromosomal analysis in combination with immunofluorescence," Marc Beal, director of corporate development for Biosearch, said in a statement. "This unique property of Stellaris probes enables transactional analysis from transcription through translation at the single-cell and single-molecule level."
Sanjay Tyagi, co-inventor of the Stellaris-based RNA FISH technology, added, "The single-molecule sensitivity afforded by Stellaris probes is providing unprecedented insights into diverse biological processes ranging from RNA localization, RNA processing, the assessment of noise in gene expression. The availability of pre-labeled sets of probes from Biosearch is a tremendous help to cell biologists who no longer need to be concerned with the complexities of probe selection and probe chemistry."
Today's announcement follows Biosearch's deal last month to acquire the oligonucleotide manufacturing division of DNA Technology.