Life Technologies this week awarded innovation grants to five research labs for projects using its QuantStudio 3D digital PCR system.
Life Tech selected 20 finalists from an initial pool of 120 applications to generate data using the QuantStudio 3D. It then whittled this group to five awardees, which the company announced at the American Society for Human Genetics conference in Boston.
Winning projects used digital PCR in applications ranging from detecting chimerism in bone marrow transplants to revealing genetically modified organisms in processed foods.
Awardees will receive a QuantStudio 3D , a chip-based system with individual reactions run in parallel on a silicon substrate etched with 20,000 nanoscale reaction wells, according to Life Tech's website. The company launched the platform in late 2012 with an approximately $30,000 price tag, which it hoped would help drive widespread adoption of digital PCR in life science research (PCR Insider 11/8/2012).
Projects chosen used digital PCR to:
• Detect increasing levels of chimerism in clinical samples from stem cell transplant patients with leukemia — Antonio Jimenez-Velasco, Carlos Haya Hospital, Spain
• Quantify primary miRNA transcripts in neurons following alcohol exposure — Andre Pietrzykowski, Rutgers University
• Determine HER2 copy number variation in FFPE-derived breast cancer samples — Bruno Ping, Royal Surrey County Hospital, UK
• Detect GMOs in a mixture of complex food — Pengyu Zhu, China Agriculture University
• Perform absolute quantification of reference samples — Shin-ichiro Fujii, National Metrology Institute of Japan