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Receptor Binding
Subcellular Fractions
Microsomes
Enzymes and Proteins
RNA, DNA, cDNA
Animal Tissues
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CUSTOM BIOREAGENTS
ABS can provide virtually any type of biological reagents for drug discovery on a custom basis. These range from membrane preparations to RNA and protein extracts from human and animal tissues, or cell cultures. The following provides some ideas on the types of preparations that we can provide to help speed your research.
In addition, examples of tissues and
body fluids, as well as product
categories can be found
here.
Membrane Preparations for Receptor Binding
ABS first products in 1990 were membranes preparations for receptor binding. Since then we have made virtually every type of receptor binding preparation from a wide range of human and animal tissues and cell cultures.
Unlike other companies that supply stock preparations, ABS focuses upon providing custom preparations that exactly meet your requirements. Drug discovery research at the forefront of science often focuses upon receptors and other gene products that are typically proprietary in nature. ABS has focused its efforts and expertise in meeting the need for these types of products.
Most often, we work with your procedures. However, we also can use our own in-house protocols. Rather than you expending client time and resources, we can quickly make your preparations using human or animal tissues to meet your specific requirements. We can also use cell lines that either you supply or we acquire. These we can grow in our high capacity cell culture facility (Please see Cell Culture Services for details.).
ABS has a large number of centrifuges and other equipments to produce large quantities of membranes and other bioreagents. We can readily supply high throughput screening campaigns. Conversely, we are available for small research project, trial experimental runs, and methods development.
Subcellular Fractions
As with our custom membranes preparations, we can prepare on a custom basis virtually any subcellular fraction; from mitochondria to nuclear extracts. These can be made using your protocols or your, starting with almost any tissue or cell source.
Microsomes
We separated this category of subcellular fractions because it like membrane preparations is of special interest for drug discovery and development. Over the years, ABS has prepared microsomes from a wide variety of species and tissues, including: liver, intestines, kidney, and nasal mucosa. In particular, ABS has considerable experience in preparing human liver microsomes for drug metabolism studies. We do not presently evaluate these with respect to enzymatic activity, because most of our customers generally characterize these in their own labs and we guarantee the microsomes that we ship meet agreed upon specifications. However, for those customers who wish further enzymatic data, such as the activity of specific P450 enzymes, we are investigating providing this additional service.
Purified Enzymes and other Proteins
Initially, ABS focused its efforts on providing large scale partial protein purifications. These are often satisfactory for high throughput screens, and save our customers the time and effort of processing large quantities of animal or human tissues. In other cases, customers take our partially purified protein extracts and further purify according to their needs. This is often an economical alternative over our setting up and validating specific protein or enzyme assays to follow the protein purification. This remains a viable option for many of our customers. However, in collaboration with several other laboratories, ABS now offers custom preparations of highly purified proteins. Both large and small scale protein purification and analysis is available.
RNA and DNA
At ABS, RNA and DNA are routinely isolated from human tissues, animal tissues, and cell cultures on a custom basis. Both total RNA and poly A+ RNA are available. These can be DNAse treated, if you specify. The quality of all RNA is verified by formaldehyde gel electrophoresis. Pricing depends both upon the quantity of material requested, and particularly in the case of human tissues, tissue acquisition fees. It should also be noted that with custom human RNA preparations because of tissue variability (largely due to unavoidable variations in postmortem intervals and tissue handling) we may have to process tissue from multiple donors before obtaining high quality RNA. This indirectly affects our pricing and may also cause some delays before we can obtain samples that meet our quality standards and your specifications. This is especially true if the RNA is to be isolated from donors with certain disease or age restrictions.
Animal Tissues
Your major benefit from working with ABS is the high quality, efficient, and cost-effective custom bioreagents and cell culture services that we provide. However, we also provide researchers with tissues from all common laboratory animals, as well as other species. All tissues are collected and frozen (unless otherwise directed) immediately after death. We remove only a limited number of tissues per animal, because we want to limit the interval between dissection and freezing. In most cases, tissues are removed specifically for your order, although some items may occasionally be in stock and stored at -80°C.
ABS can supply bulk quantities of tissue or carry out discrete dissections or even micro-dissections. For example, individual brain nuclei can be punched from frozen brain sections. Likewise, dissections such as dorsal root ganglia, anterior pituitary, intestinal mucosa, and cardiac blood vessels are commonly done from both animal and human tissues.
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