Fluidigm BioMark System Helps Assure The Quality Of Agricultural Seed Supplies
Fluidigm Corporation and BIOKÉ, a licensed distributor for the company, has announced that Enza Zaden, one of the world's leading suppliers of high-quality vegetable seeds for agriculture, has chosen the Fluidigm's BioMark System for Genetic Engineering and the 96.96 Dynamic Array to help assure the quality of its seed supply.
As the world's food supply increasingly faces new demands for high-yielding and disease resistant crops, the need for high-quality seeds of varieties that produce great tasting, nutritious vegetables remains high. With different soil characteristics and climate zones impacting the growing experience, the world is no longer a place where the same seed meets everyone's need. Enza Zaden has responded by utilising genetically-based marker-assisted selection techniques to choose its seeds and check hundred-of-thousands of them to help ensure that it delivers just the right flavour product for everyone's palate and breeding for the right varieties to meet everyone's need.
Fluidigm's BioMark System uses integrated fluidic circuit (IFC) technology to reduce complexity, improve throughput with nanolitre precision and provide significant cost-savings (less reagent and smaller samples) for high-throughput genotyping applications. Fluidigm's BioMark 96.96 Dynamic Array is capable of performing 9,216 simultaneous real-time PCR experiments running gold-standard TaqMan assays in nanolitre quantities.
"We consider the 96.96 Dynamic Arrays a massive parallel monoplex PCR platform. We were surprised by the ease with which we could convert our standard markers for multiplex detection," said Jeroen Rouppe van der Voort Ph.D., Manager Biotechnology Research and Applications, Enza Zaden Research and Development B.V. "With the introduction of Fluidigm's 96.96 dynamic arrays, a specific gap has been filled in the area of number-of-samples times number-of-markers needed. We have searched a long time for a platform that provides the user-friendliness, speed and reliability that the BioMark System and the 96.96 Dynamic Array brings to our efforts," concluded Rouppe van der Voort.
"Enza Zaden selects seed characteristics for a wide variety of vegetable crops that match the wishes and requirements of its customers throughout the world. This marker-assisted breeding helps assure that each seed results in high-yielding crop plants with extended disease resistance for the regions in which they will be grown," said Gajus Worthington, President and CEO of Fluidigm. "We are excited and proud that our BioMark System can help Enza Zaden provide the very best product for its customers."
Fluidigm develops, manufactures and markets proprietary Integrated Fluidic Circuit (IFC) systems that significantly improve productivity in life science research. Fluidigm's IFCs enable the simultaneous performance of thousands of sophisticated biochemical measurements in extremely minute volumes. These "integrated circuits for biology" are made possible by miniaturising and integrating liquid handling components on a single microfabricated device. Fluidigm's IFC systems, consisting of instrumentation, software and single-use IFCs, increase throughput, decrease costs and enhance sensitivity compared to conventional laboratory systems. Fluidigm products have not been cleared or approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as a diagnostic and are only available for research use.
SOURCE: Fluidigm Corporation and BIOKÉ