Empirical Bioscience to Increase Annual Production of MeanGreen Reagents to Meet Customer PCR Demand

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Labs that perform numerous PCR are buying more MeanGreen master mixes because the products are optimized for use in translational research, agricultural applications, diagnostics and education.

Grand Rapids, Michigan (PRWEB) March 13, 2014

Empirical Bioscience LLC intends to more than double the production of its MeanGreen reagents this year over last year to respond to strong demand from research institutions and universities.

Company officials said labs that perform numerous polymerase chain reactions (PCR) are buying more of the master mixes because the products are optimized for use in many applications, including translational research, agricultural applications, diagnostics and education.

The MeanGreen master mixes -- so-named because they contain yellow and blue loading dyes for location and added density to help samples sink into wells -- have all the components for routine PCR except for the researcher’s primers and the DNA template.

"MeanGreen is a great tool for building confidence in students who are just becoming acquainted with lab techniques in molecular biology because it loads the dice that their experiments will yield the expected results," said Mike Wolyniak, assistant professor of biology at Hampden-Sydney College in Hampden-Sydney, Va.

"MeanGreen is the main Taq polymerase reagent that is used in his lab," said Douglas L. Wendell, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Oakland University, Rochester, Mich. "I also plan to use the 2x premix in my lab class this coming year," he added. Taq is shorthand for an often-used enzyme in PCR research that was derived from the thermophilic bacteria Thermus aquaticus found in hot springs and hydrothermal vents.

Empirical Bioscience, a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based designer and manufacturer of high grade reagents for the research, education and diagnostic markets, use rigorous manufacturing standards to take the guesswork out of whether the products used for experiments have contaminating DNA or residual nuclease activity.

Because MeanGreen reagents are produced following rigorous lot-to-lot consistency, they greatly diminish the chances that experiments will yield false negatives or false positives due to contamination, pipetting errors, and wrong component volumes and concentrations, said Jennifer Jakubowski, senior molecular biologist at Empirical Bioscience.

She said the company has seen increased demand from MeanGreen users involved in colony PCR, cloning experiments and plant DNA research, as well as other areas of molecular biology.

"For instance, running experiments with plant DNA can be a challenge because plant DNA is somewhat finicky -- it can have inhibitors that make the reactions a little harder to run," Jakubowski said. "We've heard from customers that MeanGreen gives them results they didn't see with other reagents."

The company produces two versions of MeanGreen master mixes that researchers can use immediately by just adding template DNA, primers, and water: Taq 2x MeanGreen and FlashTaq 2x MeanGreen.

Taq 2x MeanGreen Master Mix is a ready-to-use 2x mixture of Taq DNA Polymerase, dNTPs, buffers and magnesium for efficient PCR amplification. The blue and yellow loading dyes make monitoring progress during electrophoresis easy and a density agent allows reactions to be loaded directly onto agarose gels. The dyes do not obscure visualization of PCR reactions as the bands run outside the range of most products.

FlashTaq 2x MeanGreen is a chemically modified Taq polymerase designed for reducing nonspecific DNA amplification, including primer dimers. The activation time for FlashTaq is only 2 minutes at 95°C, which is faster than that of leading antibody-based hot-start Taq polymerases.

For more information on Empirical Bioscience, please visit the company's website at http://www.EmpiricalBioscience.com. The company recently introduced its rEVAlution qPCR Master Mix, an environmentally safe, ready-to-use hot-start qPCR mixture, to round out its line of offerings.

©2014 Empirical Bioscience LLC. All rights reserved. MeanGreen is a registered trademark of Empirical Bioscience and Syzygy Biotech, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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