New Products
GE Healthcare announced last week the release of its His GraviTrap 1 ml prepacked columns designed to purify histidine-tagged protein from clarified or unclarified samples without the need for a pump or purification system.
According to GE Healthcare, separations are completed in as little as 20 minutes using the His GraviTrap. The columns' protein binding capacity is approximately 40 mg per column. Purifications can be performed under either native or denaturing conditions using a wide rage of detergents, reducing agents and other additives.
The Max Planck Institute for Informatics has released DomainNetworkBuilder, a Cytoscape plug-in that decomposes protein networks into domain-domain interactions. According to the developers, the software transforms each protein node into a chain of consecutive domain nodes and constructs a putative network of interacting domain nodes. The plug-in is available at http://med.bioinf.mpi-sb.mpg.de/domainnet/index.html, and will also be available through the Cytoscape site at http://www.cytoscape.org/plugins2.php.
The Reactome project at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the European Bioinformatics Institute has released Reactome version 15 at http://www.reactome.org. The release includes 1,463 total reactions and 1,095 annotated human proteins. New features include a module on the integration of energy metabolism, a revised data model to improve the handling of physical entities, and a new strategy for electronic inference of events in model organisms from curated human reactions.
Movers & Shakers
Samuel Broder has joined the board of directors of Protein Design Labs, the Fremont, Calif.-based company said yesterday. He is the chief medical officer of Celera Genomics and Celera Diagnostics. Prior to that, he was senior vice president for research and development at Ivax, and before that, director of the National Cancer Institute. Broder has a medical degree and a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan.
Greg Lucier has become a member of the board of trustees of the Burnham Institute, the La Jolla, Calif.-based institute said last week. He is president and chief executive officer of Invitrogen.
Thomas Joos and Forest White have joined the scientific advisory board of Epitome Biosystems, the Waltham, Mass.-based company said last week. Joos is head of the biochemistry department at the NMI Natural and Medical Sciences Institute at the University of T bingen in Germany. White is an assistant professor in the division of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.