Cambridge, United Kingdom
August 16, 2002

Syngene is pleased to announce that GeneTools, its image analysis software, is being used by researchers at the University of Cambridge as part of a rapid method to study genetically modified plants and enzymes that degrade plant cell walls.

The innovative method, which could save thousands of research hours, was recently published in the prestigious journal, Analytical Biochemistry. It uses GeneTools to perform automatic quantification of fluorescently labelled oligosaccharides on polyacrylamide gels and provides a unique profile of the plant’s cell wall composition.

Dr Florence Goubet, a post-doctoral scientist from Dr Paul Dupree’s team in the Department of Biochemistry at the University explained the significance of the research: “The use of electrophoresis and automated quantification replaces classical HPLC, which takes around a day to generate results for a few plant samples. However, using this method it still takes a day to do the preparation but in that time we can process up to 100 samples. We are now using it to identify whether we have successfully managed to genetically engineer plants by looking at how the profile of oligosaccharides in the mutant plant cell wall has altered.”

“We decided to use GeneTools as part of this method because it is easier than most of the other software packages we tried and is so well automated sometimes you’ve done the quantification without even realising it,” added Dr Goubet.

Paul Ellwood, Syngene’s Sales and Marketing Director commented: ”We are delighted to see GeneTools being used by this well-respected group as part of their essential research because it is a great endorsement of the software’s accuracy and applicability for quantification work. This new method shows GeneTools has the potential to increase sample throughput by up to 100 times, and if it becomes more widely adopted could save plant geneticists world-wide hours of valuable research time.”