A couple news worthy Happenings

I’ve come a cross two interesting tidbits I wanted to share.

From the Gazette yesterday,

BioElectronics’ ActiPatch was named one of the nine ‘‘Medical Breakthroughs That May Change Your Life” by Medical Headway, an online medical library in Texas.

The patch, used for a variety of post-surgery applications, delivers gentle pulses that reduce bruising and speed soft tissue healing.

‘‘ActiPatch fills the void created by consumers who would rather not take pain medications and are seeking safe and effective alternative treatment options,” said Reginald Saxton, president of Medical Headway.

I’ve been ranting about it’s benefits for a while and can offer personal testimony to it’s efficacy. BioElectronics has also just expanded and moved into the new, lower level of our building, as further testimony to the benefit and success of their products.

I saw an interesting article this morning out of SuperArray via BioMed Central. SuperArray is also moving into a beautiful new facility off New Design at the intersection of the Executive Way extension.

Cross-platform comparison of SYBR Green real-time PCR with TaqMan PCR, microarrays and other gene expression measurement technologies evaluated in the MicroArray Quality Control (MAQC) study

BMC Genomics 2008, 9:328doi:10.1186/1471-2164-9-328

Published:	11 July 2008

Abstract (provisional)

Background

The MicroArray Quality Control (MAQC) project evaluated the inter- and intra-platform reproducibility of seven microarray platforms and three quantitative gene expression assays in profiling the expression of two commercially available Reference RNA samples. The tested microarrays were the platforms from Affymetrix, Agilent Technologies, Applied Biosystems, GE Healthcare, Illumina, Eppendorf and the National Cancer Institute, and quantitative gene expression assays included TaqMan Gene Expression PCR Assay, Standardized (Sta) RT-PCR and QuantiGene. The data showed great consistency in gene expression measurements across different microarray platforms, different technologies and test sites. However, SYBR Green real-time PCR, another common technique utilized by half of all real-time PCR users for gene expression measurement, was not addressed in the MAQC study. In the present study, we compared the performance of SYBR Green PCR with TaqMan PCR, microarrays and other quantitative technologies using the same two Reference RNA samples as the MAQC project. We assessed SYBR Green real-time PCR using commercially available RT2 ProfilerTM PCR Arrays from SuperArray, containing primer pairs that have been experimentally validated to ensure gene-specificity and high amplification efficiency.

Results

The SYBR Green PCR Arrays exhibit good reproducibility among different users, PCR instruments and test sites. In addition, the SYBR Green PCR Arrays have the highest concordance with TaqMan PCR, and a high level of concordance with other quantitative methods and microarrays that were evaluated in this study in terms of fold-change correlation and overlap of lists of differentially expressed genes.

Conclusions

These data demonstrate that SYBR Green real-time PCR delivers highly comparable results in gene expression measurement with TaqMan PCR and other high-density microarrays.