Axaron Bioscience has launched its iGentifier, a transcription profiling technology for the food industry designed to identify genes and biochemical pathways.
With the EC heavily regulating GMO foods in Europe the technology will be a boon to many food producers wanting to keep an increasingly careful eye on the genetic and biochemical content of both processed and whole foods.
Axaron says that compared to conventional technologies, iGentifier offers key advantages in terms of robustness, sensitivity and reliability. Combining the advantages of fragment display with tag sequencing methods, it aims to detect the most subtle changes in gene expression, ensuring time- and cost-effective transcription analysis that is said to exceed the limits of microarrays.
Users benefit from high quality of data regardless of species, sample numbers, or tissue of interest, thereby achieving their goals earlier and seeing a faster return on investment, the company says. The technology can also be customised to fit into customers' existing genomic platform or as a complete service solution. So far in Europe German-based BASF is Axaron's first customer to use the iGentifier service as part of its crop protection programme.
Axaron's CEO, Dr Alfred Bach commented, "iGentifier is the latest addition to Axaron's cutting-edge functional genomics and proteomics platform. Based on more than six years experience with customers, we developed iGentifier to combine the advantages of all currently available open transcription profiling technologies. We are convinced that this novel technology will set new standards in transcription profiling in the Life Sciences industry."