Submit Your Pictures and Enter to Win $100 in Cash

Allele Biotech is holding another fun contest to give back to our loyal supporters and everyone has the chance to win $100 in cash! We are looking for interesting and relevant pictures, illustrations, and computer generated art that pertains to any Allele Biotech Product or service to replace the flashes on our homepage. If it is chosen to be used we will give you $100 cash!

Check out our technical data sheets, read our past blogs, and even use your own lab experience and impressions with Allele Biotech Products to come up with your entry. There are over 1000 products to choose from so everyone should have lots of inspiration!

All you have to do to enter is submit your picture to our facebook inbox! The picture has to be of your own creation and/or one to which you own exclusive rights. Response time and prizes will take about a week.

Let your creative juices flow and you could get $100 in return. Your picture could be funny, serious, or even super nerdy!

Used to promote our Sapphire(TM) Baculovirus Expression Service

All photos, illustrations, and computer generated graphics (aka. “the picture”) submitted must be lawfully owned by entrants who submitted them. Pictures that are not chosen will not be used in any way by Allele Biotech. Winners may collect their prize via cash, check, or a one-time Allele credit of $100 good toward any Allele Biotech purchase. Allele Biotech has full rights to pictures selected for use in Allele advertising and winners must forfeit any future rights to the picture. Contest to run indefinitely and to be terminated at any time.

Tags: cash prize, contest, submit pics for cash, win $100

New product of the week 01-11-10 to 01-17-10

Light-driven proton pumps were used to to silence the activity of genetically specified neurons in a report by Chow et al. in the latest issue of Nature. Genetic delivery of proton pump proteins, Arch and Mac, will be of significant help to neurology labs. We have started put these genes into Allele Biotech’s ready-to-infect lentivirus and retrovirus, which will be available for shipping within a week or two. Allele Biotech decided to list these viral particle products as this WEEK’S NEW PRODUCT among a good number of choices to reflect our model of doing business and science: move fast and stay on the front edge of multiple moving fields.

New product of the week 01-11 to 01-17-10: arch and mac Expression Lentiviral Particles Cat # ABP-RP-TLCARC or TLCMAC.

Promotion of the week: 20% off our most popular TA cloning kit with top of the line competent cells, as announced every Monday through our social networks. Follow us there is you want to get them in time to make a purchase at the deeply discounted prices.

Tags: arch, channelrhodopsins, Chow et al., Halorubrum sodomense, ion modulator, Light-driven, mac, optogenetic, proton pumps, silence of neurons, silencing of neural activity

Allele Biotech is 10 Years Old and Celebrating with FREE Oligos!

Allele Biotech is 10 years old!!!!!!! December 1999 was when Dr. Jiwu Wang and colleagues started this great company as a DNA oligo and siRNA service provider to the San Diego area. Since then he has fearlessly lead Allele into the forefront of the biotechnology industry with multiple RNAi patents, numerous NIH grants, revolutionary iPSC and fluorescent protein technologies, the acquisition of Orbigen, a continuously growing catalog of over 1000 molecular biology products and signature Allele Biotech Reagents, and a business culture that is approachable, encouraging, and reverential of research advancement through global communication and collaboration.

What a difference a decade makes. Today Allele Biotech is a top oligo service provider all around the country with customers in all of America’s major academic institutions. Currently, we are the sole oligo provider on the University of California San Diego’s central purchasing site, Marketplace; a collaboration designed to provide top quality oligonucleotides to UCSD research departments while saving them thousands of dollars annually. We now produce many of our own oligo synthesis and modification reagents, further cutting the costs to our valuable customers which enabled us to continue operations this last year without raising prices due to the worldwide acetonitrile shortage which more than quadrupled in cost! Allele Biotech has stood out over the years not only to our loyal customers but other oligo providers as well. Less than 5 years into our operation we were approached by one of the well known, top three, oligo providers in an attempt to buy us out! We resisted and are still here to proudly serve the research community with the Allele brand!

It all started with oligos…Now ten years later we want to honor our accomplishment by giving away a FREE month of oligos to one lucky customer! To enter you must be an Allele Biotech Facebook fan or friend. A winner will be randomly selected from our friends/fan pool on Sunday, February 14th, 1210 at noon. That lucky winner will receive FREE oligos for the month of March 2010! Limitations apply. Click here for terms and conditions.

Tags: 10 year with Allele Biotech, 10th anniversary promotion, anniversary promotion, FREE oligos, oligo services

Construction of An Image Library

The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) is “pleased to announce the receipt of a U.S. National Institutes of Health Grand Opportunities (GO) grant to build The Cell: An Image Library. The ASCB will be hiring eight cell biologists or microscopists, each at 25% time,” The job description includes, according to an email job posting, “selecting exemplary images and videos and providing metadata for short tags or descriptions as well as longer annotations including technical details crucial for image interpretations. Annotators will select related key words and note biological source, context, item type, etc., in accordance with set guidelines. Annotators will upload images and videos to the Society’s new image library for research and education.” The grant is in the million dollar range.

The need for creating an extensive image library is deservingly recognized by this “GO” grant from the stimulus program awarded to the NIH by the federal government. The difficult part will be to maintain such an image center once the grant runs out. Will it be kept up-to-date and relevant, or left to collect dust on the old images? We wish that the program would be a great success and that the NIH money well spent.

Allele Biotech has applied to the same round of NIH grants with a related proposal that, rather than cell images in general, focuses more on cell differentiation/dedifferentiation through the use of iPS cells. Title: Foundation for “Subcellular Structureome” as Stem Cell Differentiation Parameters. Summary: The key question to be addressed is how to characterize differentiating stem cells along different lineages definitively and continuously, without disrupting or disturbing the differentiating cells. The broad and long-term goals are to find ways of describing stem cell differentiation in more detailed steps, thereby providing methods to predict and direct cell fate commitment.

Aim 1 Create a panel of cells that can be reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with fluorescent protein (FP) fusion markers for each organelle

.Human fibroblasts and keratinocytes will be selected from a large collection of primary human cells, based on their ease to grow and transfect, number of potential cell passages, and potentials for reprogramming with induction reagents. A group of 24 subcellular localization polypeptides (LP) and FP fusion protein constructs currently offered by Allele Biotech will be stably transfected into the selected cell.

Aim 2 Characterize the morphological changes of subcellular structures during iPSC differentiation.

Transfected primary cells that stably express subcellular localization marker proteins will be induced with either current retroviral/lentiviral vectors based reprogramming cDNAs, or a non-integrating baculoviral vector under development at Allele Biotech. These cells, 48 lines in total, will be maintained and expanded under stem cell culture conditions, then induced to differentiate into chondracytes or keratinocytes as examples of cell fate. Morphology data will be analyzed and recorded at each known stage and additional “substage” to be defined in the process.

Aim 3 Correlate morphological changes to known molecular properties of each stage and provide a “signature” set of morphological changes for each stage of each lineage

Signature morphological changes, i.e. significantly different shape, location, sub-type, and copies of organelles in a cell compared to its immediate upstream stage, will be correlated to results obtained by standard expression assays at the RNA and protein levels.

Aim 4 Use the morphology parameters to establish more defined stages of cell fate commitments

Data points will be used to create a novel morphology-based cell fate commitment atlas, which will be very helpful in guiding the stem cell and regenerate medicine research at molecular biology, cell biology and physiology levels.

Aim 5 Construct more FP fusions as organelle-specific markers and combine with stage specific gene promoter driven markers

If necessary, we plan to identify more LPs as fusion marker partners after obtaining the initial set of data, and to expand the signature morphology image database. The database can be further complemented with stage-specific gene promoter driven FP images.

Weekly Promotion of Nov 30-Dec 6: 15% off luciferase assay kit ABP-PA-ABLA011 1000 reactions at only $250.00 212.50. Compare it to what you normally pay for firefly luciferase assays and find out how much you are saving.

Reminder: Allele Biotech Spotlight Promo for ASCB Dec 09 Meeting is still on, order by Dec 9th on iPS and FP groups!

New Product of the Week of Nov 30-Dec 6: Allele Biotech’s ProperFold expression vector with fluorescent protein as indicator for proper protein folding, tracking, and purification. pORB-mWasabi+-sIRES-VSVG

AlleleNews- In pursuit of global information and communication

Allele’s ardent endeavor to create a platform for relevant, technical, biology news is paying off with the potential for everyone to benefit from our philosophy that all researchers should be given an opportunity to talk to the world about their discoveries while being able to learn about techniques they might otherwise have never heard of.

Our news site which provides the latest updates of Allele Biotech business and product developments is now also a platform for the global scientific community to introduce their techniques, products, and various other discoveries. While we still provide these news releases on our blog site and other social networking venues, we will utilize this multichannel approach for news announcements to cater to the assortment of appetites around the globe.

Our most recent addition to the “News Releases from Other Companies” section of the AlleleNews site is from Randox Laboratories announcing their development of a rapid, multi-marker screen for illegal drugs that requires as little as 7ul of urine for the screening of up to 10 drug classes. They postulate that this innovating technology will eliminate time and cost for high throughput laboratories at the rate of 1088 tests per hour!

We encourage all to contribute to and look to AlleleNews as an archetype for the exchange of cutting edge news from around the world. For submission approval please email oligo@allelebiotech.com with “AlleleNews Submission” in the subject line.

Tags: biotech news, cooperation in biotechnology, global science, lattest techniques, post your news, research around the world