This story has been updated from a previous version to include information about the agreement between TATAA Biocenter and Roche.
Quantitative PCR service provider TATAA Biocenter will collaborate with Takara Bio Europe on qPCR training and will begin offering custom Roche qPCR assays under separate agreements announced today.
As part of its collaboration with Takara Bio Europe, TATAA and Takara will offer free educational webinars on real-time PCR for academic and industrial researchers and laboratory technicians.
The webinars will be designed to help beginners overcome the major hurdles of the qPCR technique. For instance, "the complexity of most biological samples makes designing experiments and protocols challenging," Mikael Kubista, CEO and founder of TATAA Biocenter, said in a statement.
Participants will also be tested on their newly-acquired knowledge with prizes of either a year’s supply of Takara Bio qPCR reagents or a place in a qPCR wet lab course at TATAA Biocenter, with contributions to travel costs for the "top of class."
Jean-Jacques Farhi, president of Takara Bio Europe, noted that the company believes that "consistent and comparable PCR data can only be generated by a combination of well-designed experiments and high-quality reagents, such as those in the Takara/Clontech range." Takara Bio Europe recently began offering both Takara Bio and Clontech products through a unified sales channel (PCR Insider, 2/9/12).
Meantime, TATAA will expand its service offerings to include high-throughput gene expression profiling using Roche´s RealTime ready custom qPCR assays and panels. TATAA Biocenter's laboratories provide contract research for a full range of real-time qPCR services, including primer and probe design, validation, data analysis, and kit and instrument evaluation to pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
"After extensive testing and validation of the various offerings on the market, we selected the Roche RealTime ready platform for its excellent performance combined with a workflow with exceedingly user-friendly wizard-based data mining with GenEx from MultiD Analysis," Kubista said in a statement.
Founded in 2001, TATAA is based in Gothenburg, Sweden, and has offices in Sunnyvale, California, and Prague, Czech Republic.