Blog

Vacuolar processing enzyme (VPE) is involved in manyplant physiological processes and functions as a cysteine protease. It plays important roles in immunity, programmed cell death, leaf senescence andseed maturation. VPE has caspase-1-like activity and it is thought that caspases are evolutionarily related to this enzyme. The biological relevance of VPE makes the development of tolls to study this enzyme extremely valuable for research purposes.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly forms of cancer with a survival rate of only 6%. Most cancer therapies are not effective in the treatment of pancreatic cancer because cancer cells are intrinsically resistant. The study of molecular and cellularcharacteristics of the tumor is therefore essential to understand how this cancer works at the molecular level and to develop new therapies. We now have all the techniques available to do a full characterization of cancer cells, such as DNA and mRNA sequencing, and signaling protein arrays. This molecular characterization allows a better classification of the tumor and therefore helps to predict response to treatment and prognosis.

The scaling up of a biomagnetic separation process is not an easy task if we use classical magnetic separators. In these devices, the magnetic force over the beads changes with the distance, thus the magnetic force profile is very different at different volumes. However, using advanced biomagnetic separation systems, the magnetic force becomes constant at all the working volume. Then the process scaling up is straightforward: you just need to use systems with the same magnetic force, and you would have the same separation conditions regardless the scale.

Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP) is the causative agent for Johne’s disease that affects cattle and leads to wasting of the infected animals. In a herd, most animals infected are asymptomatic but still propagate diseasethrough their milk and feces. This makes the most susceptible animals develop sickness and the within-herd transmission uncontrolled. It is therefore important to detect MAP infection early and even when it is causing only latent infection. The most used test for the detection of MAP in animal blood or milk samples is ELISA with MAP-specific antibodies. The problem with this essay is that the detection limit is high and this leads to false negatives, which limits the effective detection of infected animals. The most sensitive method available is liquid and solid culture. However, since MAP has a slow growth rate and no media is truly selective for these bacteria, there are a lot of instances where culture overgrowth by contaminating organisms impairs MAP viability and limits detection to 23% with many false negative results. Molecular based methods such as PCR are also used and are more rapid and sensitive but they do not assess the viability of MAP cells.

Stablishing a separation time is the most usual way to specify a biomagnetic separation process. The problem is that this magnitude is not only related with the magnetic beads suspension, but also with the specific system used to perform the separation.

Nucleic acid detection is crucial in the clinical practice since it can be used to rapidly identify pathogenic organisms. Rapid detection with highly sensitive methods is essential for diagnosis and choosing treatment courses. This is a complex task since samples need to be enriched with the nucleotide targets and at the same time needs to eliminate nucleases, PCR inhibitors and host material. This means that to detect and identify genetic material from a pathogen, in the form of 18S and 28S rRNA, in an efficient and reliable way, the protocol needs to eliminateeukaryotic rRNA from the sample to avoid competition for the substrates during the cDNA synthesis, since it decreases the detection sensitivity.