Waters and Protea Sign Co-Marketing Agreement for LAESI® DP-1000 Direct Ionization System

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Waters Corporation and Protea Biosciences Group, Inc. have announced a co-marketing agreement enabling customers of Waters® SYNAPT® G2 & G2-S HDMS systems to take advantage of Protea's LAESI DP-1000.
The combination of the technologies enables laboratories to perform fast and direct analyses of biological samples.
Protea's LAESI DP-1000 system uses Laser Ablation Electrospray Ionization (LAESI) technology to help identify biomolecules like metabolites, lipids, peptides, and proteins in native biological samples including tissue, blood, urine, live cells, and colonies.
With little or no sample preparation, biomolecules can be quickly ionized and accurately mapped to specific cellular structures or tissue locations under ambient conditions.
When coupled to high resolution mass spectrometers, the LAESI DP-1000 is capable of quantifying biomolecules as well.
According to Alessandro Baldi, Vice President and General Manager at Protea, "This collaboration will provide Waters customers an excellent tool for two and three dimensional profiling of tissues and for mapping the spatial distribution of biomolecules in biological samples. In addition, customers are able to directly analyze open well plates for high throughput applications on Waters mass spectrometry instrumentation."
"The combination of LAESI with SYNAPT's ability to separate isomeric species based on cross sectional area, using ion mobility, is particularly exciting and will undoubtedly facilitate discovery in this kind of complex analysis," says Dr. Steve Smith, Senior Director of MS Product Management, Waters Division.
Under the agreement, Protea will make the LAESI DP-1000 available to new and existing users of Waters' SYNAPT G2 and SYNAPT G2-S mass spectrometers running under MassLynx® control.
The technology is expected to have a broad range of commercial applications including chemical and biological research, surgical pathology, chemical and biological defense, forensics, and agriculture.
LAESI represents a minimally invasive and minimally destructive approach to analysis making it possible to probe tissues and cells for their molecular composition in three dimensions and with changes in time.
The Scientist Magazine has recognized the LAESI DP-1000 as one of 2011's Top 10 Innovations of the year.