Author: Promega

Just Keep Swimming: How the Wisdom of a Blue Cartoon Fish Can Inspire Us Amid COVID-19

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Today’s blog is written by guest blogger Karen Stakun, Global Brand Manager at Promega.

Wise words from a forgetful blue fish are uniting Promega employees during these trying days. Initiated by our VP of Operations as a rallying call to employees and reinforced through a kind gesture from the Hollywood writer and director who dreamed up the fish, I invite you to join Promega as we “Just Keep Swimming.”

Those words were uttered by Dory, a blue tang with short-term memory loss, in the 2003 animated movie Finding Nemo. Now a classic, it tells the story of Marlin, an overprotective clownfish, who searches the ocean for his missing son Nemo. Dory is his sometimes-unwelcome companion. Desperate to find his son, Marlin grows exhausted and begins to feel defeated, but Dory will not let him give up. Her motivation is simple yet potent. “Just Keep Swimming.”

Setting the Scene

As COVID-19 was emerging in China, Promega began scaling up manufacturing in January to meet the growing global need for testing products. As epidemic became pandemic, and demand quickly became unprecedented, we moved swiftly to increase capacity and add more shifts at our Madison manufacturing facilities, all while ensuring the safety of our employees.

All of this takes dedicated people, especially those on our operations team, working long hours in an atmosphere of global uncertainty. Dedication is in abundance at Promega, as every employee feels a deep commitment to humanity’s struggle against this disease. However, Chuck York, our VP of Operations, says he began seeing the team struggle with the never-ending increases in demand. Despite record product totals, it could be demoralizing for a group that prides itself on always being able to deliver what customers need.

That’s when Chuck recalled one of his family’s favorite movies. “I love the never-give-up aspect of Finding Nemo and in particular the net scene.” Toward the end of the movie, Dory and several other fish find themselves caught in a fishing net. With Nemo’s help, the fish realize they can turn Dory’s mantra into action. They keep swimming together in the same direction and break free of the net.   

“I wanted the team to focus on what we could control, doing all we can each day to keep product flowing. And we were and are doing an outstanding job of that. I also hoped to lighten the mood and bring a smile to peoples’ faces. Our ‘net’ is the ever surging COVID-19 demand, but eventually we will overcome if we just keep swimming.”

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Fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic With Antibody Testing: The Importance of Serological Assays

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Today’s blog is written by Ashley G. Anderson, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Promega.

The need for reliable virus detection methods is central to the global response to COVID-19. These test results not only inform health decisions for individual patients, but they also help us build projections of how the virus will spread, which can in turn influence policy decisions.

Following the emergence of COVID-19, PCR-based tests were developed and deployed to detect the virus in patients in hospitals. PCR, or Polymerase Chain Reaction, is a common technique used in labs to amplify large quantities of DNA. The detection tests use swabs placed deep into the back of the nose to detect genetic material carried by SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19.

Those tests have been crucial to monitoring infection rates and informing patient treatment, but at this point they have fallen short of providing an overall picture of the pandemic. We know that thousands more cases have likely gone untested due to mild or unnoticed symptoms or lack of access to tests. Since PCR-based methods can only tell us if the virus is active in the patient at the time of sample and offer no information about whether a patient has been infected in the past, we currently have no way to determine how many of these unconfirmed cases exist or which patients have recovered. Serological assays are the one of the most promising tools to address that question.

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Wisconsin’s Public-Private Partnership to Increase COVID-19 Testing Capacity

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This blog is written by Sara Mann, General Manger, Promega North America Branch

Promega is part of a new public-private partnership among Wisconsin industry leaders to increase the state’s laboratory testing capacity for COVID-19. I am pleased to represent Promega in this effort. The valuable insight we at Promega are gaining every day through our participation in this innovative partnership not only benefits Wisconsin labs, it also provides unique understandings about how we can best meet the testing needs of our customers around the world.

Promega Maxwell Instrument shown in a laboratory.

The new partnership includes laboratory support from Exact Sciences, Marshfield Clinic Health System, UW Health, as well as Promega. These organizations, along with the Wisconsin Clinical Lab Network, are sharing knowledge, resources, and technology to bolster Wisconsin’s testing capacity. Our goal is to help labs find the quickest approach to the most tests with their validated methods.

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Meeting Customer Needs in Response to Market Dynamics: Responding to the Coronavirus Pandemic

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Today’s blog is written by Chuck York, VP of Manufacturing Operations at Promega.

Coronavirus SARS-2-CoV continues to fuel unprecedented demand for COVID-19 related products. Once a term relegated to virology research labs, “coronavirus” is now a household term and a global crisis that has upended lives, disrupted entire economies and shaken our sense of normalcy.

Clinicians, researchers, government officials and the general public are understandably concerned about the availability of reagents for coronavirus testing. At Promega, we are hearing the needs and concerns of our scientific colleagues and partners, and we are doing all that we can to help alleviate them.

At Promega, we are hearing the needs and concerns of our scientific colleagues and partners, and we are doing all that we can to help alleviate them.

As a global company with thousands of products, we have been meeting customer demand in response to market dynamics for decades. Our long-term approach has served customers well. Our efforts to provide support for the COVID-19 response began in early January, with our work with our colleagues and customers in China. We are applying what we’ve learned to propel us forward in the most efficient way now.  

We continue to increase production of all COVID-19 related reagents and instruments due to an unprecedented increase in global demand. Production lines that were running one shift 5 days a week are now operating 3 shifts seven days a week, and we continue to take measures to increase our manufacturing capacity.

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The Art of Being a Field Scientist

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Today’s article is written by guest blogger Vince Debes, this year’s winner of the Promega Art Contest for Creative Scientists. He will be starting a Master of Science program in Geological Sciences in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University this fall.

Grand Tetons at night

It’s incredible how seemingly insignificant actions can lead to major events years down the road. When my partner and I were testing out our new camera shutter remotes in the Grand Tetons on the way to do field work in Yellowstone, I never imagined an image we captured would lead to a grand prize in the Promega Art Contest for Creative Scientists. The four-minute-long exposure was taken at midnight with a full moon and shows the ghostly, almost imperceptible, movements of Colter Bay marina vessels against a backdrop of trailing stars and the stolid Tetons.

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From Forensic Analysis to Taco Thursday: My Experience as a Promega Intern

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Today’s blog is written by guest blogger, Kali Denis, an intern in our scientific applications group. You’ll find her bio at the end of the article.

A few months ago, I stood in front of my freezer at home, holding a bag with a tube full of gum that I chewed. The freezer was overflowing, as we had just done our weekly grocery shopping, so I ended up stuffing the bag next to some frozen fish sticks. I wondered how long it would take for one of my roommates to question just exactly what this gross-looking bag was doing in our freezer. I doubt they would have ever guessed that it was for a project at my internship!

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Researching the Researcher: Abbeah Navasca, 2019 Real-Time PCR Grant Winner

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The three winners of the 2019 Real-Time PCR Grants have been hard at work in the six months since receiving their grants. Each winner was eligible to receive up to $10,000 in free PCR reagents as well as the opportunity to collaborate with our knowledgeable technical service and training teams.

Abbeah Navasca is a plant pathology researcher with the Tagum Agricultural Development Company, Inc. (TADECO*, Philippines). She is developing treatments for viral infections that affect one of Philippines’ largest and most valuable agricultural exports: bananas. As a result of the qPCR grant, she and two of her colleagues were able to participate in sample preparation and analysis workshops with Promega Technical Services experts in Singapore. During her visit, the team worked through strategies for plant sample preparation and amplified those samples with the GoTaq® 1-Step RT-qPCR System. We had a chance to ask her more before she headed back to her lab.

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Stakeholder Capitalism—40 Years Later

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Today’s blog is written by guest blogger, Penny Patterson, VP Corporate Communications at Promega.

The idea that businesses need to serve and provide value to constituents in addition to shareholders is one that has gained increasing recognition since last summer when the Business Roundtable issued its “Statement on the Purpose of the Corporation.”   The topic of what some call “stakeholder capitalism” surfaced again heading into the World Economic Forum in January 2020.

Promega has practiced “stakeholder capitalism” for more than 40 years and, as we’ve shared through our corporate responsibility reporting for the last decade, we have seen meaningful impact. From our founding in 1978, we have taken a “whole human” approach to our business. For us this means growing a financially stable and profitable company that considers and benefits science, employees, customers, community, shareholders and all global residents.

This approach starts with our people. We live the notion that every one of our employees has the potential to make a meaningful difference. And they do. Here are just a few examples. Our manufacturing and operations teams deliver with 99% accuracy and a complaint rate of 0.004%.  Discoveries by our R&D scientists generate some of the most read papers among key science journals. The average tenure of our leadership team is 18 years, and over half of these leaders grew their careers and capabilities at Promega.

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Researching the Researchers: Alberto Biscontin

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2019 Real-Time PCR Grant

The three 2019 Real-Time PCR Grant Winners have been hard at work in the six months since winning their grants. Each winner was eligible to receive up to $10,000 in free PCR reagents as well as the opportunity to collaborate with our knowledgeable technical service and training teams.

One of the 2019 winners, Alberto Biscontin (University of Padova, Italy), performs research in the fields of Neurogenetics and Chronobiology. He is looking to shed greater light on the circadian rhythms of the Antarctic krill. Alberto published his most recent analysis in Nature and GoTaq® qPCR Master Mix helped him validate expression of genes for his study.

His qPCR data showed support for internal mechanisms that not only support daily living but also clarified the overwintering process of the krill. Now that Alberto has sized up some zooplankton, we asked him to share a little more about himself and his research:

Q: How long have you been a researcher?
A: I have been a researcher since 2012.

Q: How did you decide to research Antarctic krill?
A: In 2013, I had the opportunity to join the international Antarctic research program PolarTime. [It] brought together eight research groups with different scientific expertise to study seasonal and daily rhythms in the Antarctic krill Euphausia superba.

Q: When you are not busy at the bench, what do you like to do?
A: Traveling. I love strolling through open-air markets.

Q: Are there any tips or tricks you have learned that make your job easier?
A: You can easily switch from a classic RT-PCR protocol to a cheaper and faster One-step protocol using the same primers and temperatures.

Q: What comes next?
A: I would like to characterize the clock machinery of other polar organisms to understand whether high latitude clocks have developed similar strategies to cope with [the] polar environment. Moreover, a better understanding of marine circadian clocks could help to shed light on the evolution of the animal circadian machinery.

You can find Alberto’s most recent publication in Nature Scientific Reports. The 2020 Real-Time PCR Grant will be coming soon. For more information on the 2019 winners and information on the 2023 Grant, visit the Real-Time Grant web page. Be sure to follow us on social media for the most up-to-date information regarding the 2020 Grant, including application deadlines and winner notifications!

We’re committed to supporting scientists who are using molecular biology to make a difference. Learn more about our qPCR Grant program.  

Related Posts

Following in My Parents’ Footsteps…42 Years later

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Promega created a special incentive to reward field science consultants who help the scientific community via the Helix onsite stocking program. The winner had to meet ambitious criteria to receive 2 round-trip tickets to anywhere in the world, as well as a week of paid vacation and spending money. I won and choose to use my award to travel to Switzerland. Here is the story of my amazing trip!

This blog is written by guest blogger, Caitlin Cavanaugh.

Since I was a little girl, my parents have often reminisced about one of their favorite overseas trips taken to Switzerland in 1977. This was a trip that my parents term “BC”, which in our house refers to their fun, childless married days “Before Caitlin.” They’ve shared their photos many times of the snow capped mountains and lush, green valleys. The Swiss Alps look very different from peaks in the US, with their steep, jagged peaks and clear, blue lakes. As a nature lover and an avid hiker, I knew this would be the perfect destination to realize my love for the outdoors and to follow in the footsteps of my parents—42 years later.

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