Anatrace, Microlytic Partnership to Enable Membrane Protein Research

Anatrace and Microlytic North America, Inc., announce their partnership to develop and commercialize Analytic, a new brand of products targeted to the membrane protein research community, with particular attention to those studying high resolution three-dimensional structures.

Integral membrane proteins are of high therapeutic value, but present sizable challenges for study owing to the need to substitute the natural lipid bilayer environment of integral membrane proteins. The structural biology pipeline for these targets faces a number of specific challenges, including the selection of detergents for protein extraction and stabilization, identification of detergents, and biophysical parameters commensurate with protein crystallization.

Initial offerings under the Analytic brand represent the first commercially available kit series that addresses these challenges in a simple and quantitative manner, changing the way in which researchers will approach membrane protein crystallization. In less than two days, the kit series will allow the researcher to determine the optimal detergent for extracting a membrane protein, identify among a broad panel of detergents likely candidates for downstream applications, and screen for protein crystals through a novel two-step crystallization kit. These kits will replace multiple months of iterative work resulting in significant savings in time and reagents.