Earth Day 2020: Celebrating Nature During A Pandemic

Posted on by Jordan Villanueva

Since Wisconsin issued a Safer at Home order on March 25, I have been leaving my home exactly once a week. Every Tuesday morning, I drive to a small town outside of Madison to spend an hour monitoring a nest of bald eagles. I’ve been volunteering for Bald Eagle Nest Watch since the beginning of the year, and three weeks ago I got my first look at two newly hatched eaglets. Over the past few weeks, I’ve found that my time at the eagle nest is a wonderful relief from the stress of the pandemic and the confinement to my home.

I’m not the only person escaping to natural spaces for relief during the widespread lockdowns in response to COVID-19. Parks have been filled with people taking daily walks and enjoying fresh air when there are few places indoors they can safely go. Besides encouraging many people to visit local parks and forests, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed many complexities of humanity’s relationship with the environment. The severe drop in human activities has resulted in decreased air pollution, as well as fascinating changes in wildlife behavior. However, the pandemic is also an important reminder that the environmental impact of human activity has drastic consequences for global risk of infectious disease. This Earth Day, it’s the perfect time to pause and examine how the COVID-19 pandemic and the natural world are influencing each other for better and for worse.

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RT-qPCR and qPCR Assays—Detecting Viruses and Beyond

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

We have all been hearing a lot about RT-PCR, rRT-PCR and RT-qPCR lately, and for good reason. Real-Time Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction (rRT-PCR) is the technique used in by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to test for COVID-19. Real-time RT-PCR, or quantitative RT-PCR (RT-qPCR)*, is a specialized PCR technique that visualizes the amplification of the target sequence as it happens (in real-time) and allows you to measure the amount of starting target material in your reaction. You can read more about the basics of this technique, and watch a webinar here. For more about RT-PCR for COVID-19 testing, read this blog.

Both qPCR and RT-qPCR are powerful tools for scientists to have at their disposal. These fundamental techniques are used to study biological processes in a wide range of areas. Over the decades, Promega has supported researchers with RT-qPCR and qPCR reagents and systems to study everything from diseases like COVID-19 and cancer to viruses in elephants and the circadian rhythm of krill.  

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The Cytokine Storm: Why Some COVID-19 Cases Are More Severe

Posted on by Johanna Lee
coronavirus

Blog Updated on June 16, 2020

One of the biggest outstanding questions of the COVID-19 pandemic is why symptoms vary so much among patients. Some patients have no symptoms at all; some symptoms are mild, while others are extremely severe. Among the more severe cases, a common pattern of disease progression happens like this: A patient gets through the first week with some signs of recovery—then suddenly they rapidly deteriorate. In some cases, they go from needing just a tiny bit of oxygen to requiring a ventilator within 24 hours.

This pattern, often seen in young and otherwise healthy patients, has baffled doctors. What causes these patients to suddenly crash? Research now suggests that the patient’s own immune system may be to blame. It’s called cytokine release syndrome—also known as the “cytokine storm”.

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From Live Cells to Lysates: Adapting NanoBiT to a Biochemical Assay Format

Posted on by Natalie Larsen

The ability to target protein interactions with low solubility or weak binding affinities can present a significant challenge when it comes to drug screening. The beauty of these types of challenges we often face in the lab is that finding solutions to these problems doesn’t necessarily require brand new tools. Sometimes we already have the right tools in our arsenal and, with just a little creativity and collaboration, they can be adapted to address the challenge at hand.

In the following video, Dr. Mohamed (Soly) Ismail, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Downward Lab of the Francis Crick Institute, presents the perfect example of this with his novel approach to the NanoBiT® Protein:Protein Interaction Assay. Through a collaboration with Promega R&D Scientists, Dr. Ismail has translated the assay into a cell-free, biochemical format, termed the NanoBiT Biochemical Assay (NBBA).

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Flexible Automated Purification Solutions For Dealing With Urgent Needs

Posted on by Jordan Villanueva

Implementing a new high-throughput (HT) nucleic acid purification workflow or scaling up an existing workflow presents many unique challenges. To be successful, the chemistry and liquid handler must be perfectly integrated to fit your lab’s specific needs. This involves configuring the instrument deck, optimizing the assay chemistry, and programming the instrument.

When you’re facing a sudden spike in sample throughput demand combined with unprecedented urgency, those challenges can often become overwhelming. Even in times of crisis, Promega scientists are prepared to support labs facing challenges with HT workflows, regardless of your instrumentation platform.

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

Posted on by Promega

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

Posted on by Promega

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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10 Tips to Maintain Physical Distancing in the Lab

Posted on by Michele Arduengo

Laboratories can be crowded places. We are used to working around other people, tossing ideas back and forth. Dark rooms, cold rooms and large equipment spaces are often shared by several labs. Some labs have shut down completely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; others, especially those labs doing research around coronavirus biology, testing and detection and drug development are running continually. For those labs, maintaining the recommended 6-foot (2m) distance to help stem the coronavirus pandemic isn’t easy.

At Promega our operations, quality assurance, applications and research and development labs are up and running—focused on providing as much support as possible to our partners who are studying, diagnosing and developing treatments for COVID-19.  At the same time, we are maximizing the safety of our employees. Here are a few ways we have found to maintain critical distances in our laboratory that might help your lab group stay productive and safe too.

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How the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Enters Host Cells and How To Block It

Posted on by Johanna Lee
TE micrograph of a single MERS-CoV
Photo courtesy of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

In December 2019, a new disease emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan, China. People who were infected began experiencing fever, dry cough, muscle aches and shortness of breath. The disease swept through China like wildfire and quickly spread overseas to almost every continent. We now know the virus that caused this disease, SARS-CoV-2, is a member of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, and the disease itself was officially named COVID-19. According to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, there are 877,422 confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide, and 43,537 total deaths at the publication of this blog. Those numbers are only expected to increase over the next few weeks.

In this moment of crisis, scientists all around the world are desperately trying to find ways to treat and prevent the disease. One strategy for preventing the spread of the virus is to block its entry into human cells. But first we need to understand how SARS-CoV-2 enters human cells. A research group at the German Primate Center led by Dr. Stefan Pohlmann provides some answers in a recent publication in Cell.

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