Promega and GeneCopoeia play tag

MADISON, Wis.—Promega recently announced that the company will work with Maryland-based GeneCopoeia Inc. to combine its HaloTag protein fusion technology with GeneCopoeia's library of human and mouse open reading frame (ORF) OmicsLink sequences. These ready-to-use ORF expression clones with HaloTag have the potential to save proteomics researchers weeks of time versus performing these steps themselves.

"The savings for researchers are two-fold," says Hrissi Samartzidou, global director of gene and protein sciences with Promega. "First, it is time and effort. Cloning is a necessary evil which people have to do themselves, and depending on the clones, it can take from a few days to a few weeks. Also, it is not just the time and effort, but the quality of the content which will be validated and a lot of customers want to have that peace of mind."

GeneCopoeia brings a lot to the table in this relationship, with more than 20,000 human and 15,000 mouse ORF clones, generated from sequence-validated full-length cDNA clones using the company's proprietary cloning technologies. HaloTag adds to the value of its clone library.

"HaloTag complements our collections of genome-wide OmicsLink full-length cDNA clones from human, mouse and other species," says Dr. Sun Lu, executive vice president of GeneCopoeia.

Researchers shouldn't expect the entire library to be ready from the get-go, Samartzidou notes, though at press time, more than 2,000 clones from the library had been successfully tagged and validated. With such a range of clones, the expected delivery of OmicsLink clones with HaloTag would be for customers to request specific clones for their work and GeneCopoeia would then attach the HaloTags in-house prior to shipping.

Still, Samartzidou says the intention is for a number of the most popular clones to be ready off-the-shelf. Further, the availability of the HaloTag ORF clones will help drive additional sales of Promega's fluorescent or other ligands for HaloTag, as well as optimized assay protocols.

Sales of the clones themselves will be handled by GeneCopoeia—the HaloTag being similar to the "Intel Inside" method of sales well-known in the computing space—though Promega will have information about the tagged clones on its Web site and links to GeneCopoeia for ordering.

"It takes time and effort to get clones to use HaloTags and to do the applications researchers are interested in," says Samartzidou. "We are going to be marketing these applications and, along with that, we will market that these clones will simplify the usage of the HaloTag technology." DDN