BHQ® Patent Issued to Biosearch Technologies
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Biosearch Technologies, Inc. (BTI) has announced that it has been awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,019,129 covering the Black Hole Quencher® series of dark quenchers.
BHQ® quenchers are used routinely in a variety of fluoresence quenching applications including multiplex real-time, quantitative PCR and assays requiring FRET-quenched peptides.
The patent detailing this technology is titled "Dark quenchers for donor-acceptor energy transfer" and was developed wholly at Biosearch by Ron Cook, Matt Lyttle and Daren Dick.
Since their commercial introduction in 2000 at the Miami TIGR meeting, the BHQ quenchers have become the most frequently requested dark quenchers for FRET-based applications.
Importantly, they provide significant advantages over other quenchers: they are completely non-fluorescent, they quench across the entire visible spectrum and into the near IR and they are available as amidites, CPGs, carboxylic acids and succinimide esters for both DNA and peptide labeling.
These factors and others led to their early evaluation and commercial licensing by major custom oligonucleotide synthesis houses wanting to offer their end-user customers the advanced fluoresence quenching system available.
Biosearch now licenses the BHQ technology to major custom oligo providers in the U.S. and Europe and has recently begun licensing to custom oligo suppliers in Asia.
As the incorporation of BHQ labels into dual-labled probes for real-time qPCR has expanded and their use validated, the BHQs are now being licensed by a variety of companies both in the U.S. and abroad for incorporation into a wide range of commercial kits.
These range from basic research use only (RUO) kits to clinically important, fully validated human in vitro diagnostic kits.
In addition, the BHQs are now being incorporated into applications as diverse as veterinary and agriculture IVD, national biodefense monitoring and testing applications, aquaculture pathogen testing and the world’s first PCR-based test for monitoring of undesirable wine fermentation microbes.
In very real terms, the Black Hole Quencher dyes have become the world-wide standard for dark quenchers used in fluoresence-quenched assays.
DNA probes labeled with the BHQ technology are available from Biosearch Technologies and from Biosearch-licensed suppliers located in major markets around the globe.
