Four New Assays For Guava EasyCyte(TM) Systems Announced
Hayward, CA - Now scientists in drug discovery and oncology research have four new options for assessing cellular function including mitochondrial membrane potential, cellular proliferation, and activation of caspase 3/7 or 8 enzymes, announced Guava Technologies.
Designed for their flagship system, the Guava EasyCyte benchtop microcytometry system, the four new assays expand Guava's current suite of assays for assessing cellular function in cancer-related areas of research and will have important applications in other areas as well. The EasyCyte's 96-well microplate analysis format enables a single researcher to easily perform hundreds of cell-based assays of differing types in a single day.
"These new assays further enhance our existing assay menu that already provides a great deal of flexibility for investigators. With a single platform, they can easily interrogate multiple functional parameters in the cell in the context of absolute cell counts, subpopulation analyses, and viability," comments David Ferrick, Ph.D., Guava's vice president, biology and clinical applications. "Our current menu of assays, which include cell cycle, apoptotic indicators and proliferation, provides a comprehensive tool set for researchers investigating cell growth and cell death. We believe our total solution approach to cell biology can vastly enhance the researcher's understanding of the underlying biology. Guava has brought the power of cytometry to the bench scientist in a very accessible, easy-to-use format compatible with today's microplate-based workflow."
"The addition of these assays will continue to expand our opportunities in the oncology and immunology markets," said Kim Mulcahy, director, product marketing, "and supports our goal to bring turnkey, easy-to-use cytometry assays to the life science market."
All four of the new assays bear Guava's trademark robustness and easy of use. The new mix-and-read Guava MitoPotential(TM) Assay measures changes in the ion gradient across the mitochondrial membrane. These gradient changes typically indicate early stages of apoptosis, or cell death, and are significant for understanding a number of diseases including multiple cancers, diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis.
Guava's Caspase 8 and Caspase 3/7 Assays detect the initial and mid-stages of programmed cell death, and, in conjunction with Guava's other cell death assays, allow researchers to more finely dissect the cellular suicide effects that drug compounds have on cells.
Guava CellGrowth(TM) Assay -- a cell proliferation assay -- provides easy, reliable measurements of cellular division out to several generations. Current plate reader-based proliferation assays cannot detect if subpopulations within a sample are actively dividing or even alive; Guava CellGrowth Assay provides viability information as well as absolute counts of each generation of daughter cells, providing a more complete picture of the growth of the cell sample.
The four new Guava assays all run on the Guava EasyCyte, a compact and flexible five-parameter system. Because only a few microliters of sample are required, the Guava EasyCyte saves precious and expensive cells, reagents and compounds. The system is so easy to use that results are generated with less than a day's training. The Guava EasyCyte system runs each of Guava's turnkey assays, enabling fast and easy measurements of cell counting/viability; GFP expression and viability; apoptosis; cell cycle analysis; antigen detection; cell tracking; and more.
SOURCE: Guava Technologies