New Products
PerkinElmer launched this week a new antibody-free assay for kinase activities called the AlphaScreen PhosphoSensor. The assay is non-radioactive and allows researchers to perform direct measurements of kinase activities on full-length protein substrates where no antibody is available, PerkinElmer said.
PerkinElmer this week also introduced its AlphaScreen SureFire ERK assay kits, which combine its Alpha Screen assay technology with collaborator TGR BioSciences' SureFire ERK assay kits. The new assay enables researchers to easily screen G-Protein Coupled Receptor activation in whole cells, through homogeneous, non-radioactive measurement of phospho-ERK in whole cell lysates.
Proxeon has released ProteinCenter Open Access, a free online version of the its ProteinCenter resource. The tool, which can be found here, http://www.proxeon.com/proteincenter-open-access.html, includes a "small subset" of the functionality of the commercial version of ProteinCenter, Proxeon said. It enables single-protein queries of more than 22 million protein accession codes from GenBank, Refseq, EMBL, UniProt, Swiss-Prot, Trembl, PIR, IPI, PDB, and Ensembl.
AiO (All in One) 8, a software package that integrates several oligo-ordering, database, and DNA/protein analysis programs, is available at http://134.99.88.55/aio/.
The National Center for Biotechnology Information has released RefSeq 17 at ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/refseq/release/. The release incorporates genomic, transcript, and protein data and includes 2,631,538 proteins and sequences from 3,497 different organisms.
Movers & Shakers
PerkinElmer has appointed Daniel Marshak as vice president and chief scientific officer. Marshak will be responsible for PerkinElmer's R&D strategy, and for "helping drive its growth strategies in the emerging areas of personalized medicine and predictive diagnostics," the company said in a statement.
Marshak joins the firm from Cambrex, where he was vice president and CTO. He currently serves as an adjunct associate professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is also an advisor to PharmaFrontiers.
Marshak holds a PhD from Rockefeller University and a BA in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University.
Dietrich Ruehlmann has left BD Biosciences and joined New Zealand Trade & Enterprise, a government organization that assists New Zealand biotechnology companies in commercial endeavors.
Ruehlmann was formerly product manager for imaging and analysis in the bioimaging systems division of BD Biosciences, based in Rockville, Md.