Nordic BioSite Spin to Win sends young researcher to San Diego

Täby, Sweden: – Nordic BioSite, the leading Scandinavian supplier of validated biotechnology products, has announced the three winners of its Travel Grant Challenge, Spin to Win.The challenge, co-sponsored by BioSite and the US-based company Zymo Research, gave three skilled young researchers the chance to win cash prizes to fund a trip to the scientific conference of their choice.

The competition aimed to set new standards for plasmid DNA purification by giving research teams the opportunity to test their current plasmid purification protocols head to head against those obtainable from ZymoPURE™ spin column or Zyppy™ lysis sample kits. All contestants received a sample kit along with a kick-start entry package of various lab essentials.

High interest

The competition was run in Nordic countries and attracted many enquiries. In the end there were more than 35 validated entries, more than half of them from Sweden. Entries were also received from Norway, Finland and Denmark. Registration deadline was at the end of March with all results received by end April.

A clear majority of researchers wished to experiment with the ZymoPURE MaxiPrep kit, with its larger sample and recovery volumes (see table). However, there was also significant uptake of the smaller Zippy Miniprep and ZymoPURE MidiPrep kits.

Winners were those who returned highest quality quantitative and qualitative data from their experiments, with first prize awarded to Vasiliki Arapi, a young Greek Masters student in Molecular Biology at University of Uppsala, near Stockholm, Sweden.

Ms. Arapi was delighted to receive a surprise visit at her office from BioSite Product Manager Roger Festin to tell her she was the winner of the BioSite Travel Grant Challenge first prize of 5,000 Swedish kroner. Vasiliki will use the grant to attend the Society for Neuroscience 2016 Annual meeting in San Diego this autumn.

Second prize (1,000 SEK) went to another Uppsala researcher, Natalia Papadopoulos, while Kashiv Rasheed, from, University of Tromso, claimed third prize of 1,000 Norwegian kroner.

“We would like to thank all participants and congratulate our winners, Vasiliki, Natalia and Kashiv,” said Roger Festin. “We were also very pleased with the overall response to the competition and the quality of the entries received.

“These demonstrate just how applicable these Zymo transfection kits are across a wide variety of different laboratory set ups,” commented Mr. Festin.

“It was a really worthwhile exercise and we’ll be looking to organize a future competition, but using a different format,” he added.

About Nordic BioSite

Since the late 1990s, Nordic BioSite has become recognized as one of the pharma industry’s most innovative and customer-responsive supplier of high quality validated biotechnology products for research, diagnostics, immunology and molecular biology.

The company serves pharmaceutical, biotech, diagnostic and academic organizations with tens of thousands of different products in more than 30 different groups, ranging from antibodies to genetic vectors. These are sourced from selected manufacturers and laboratories in Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Nordic BioSite continuously introduces new products as a result of its own R&D, leveraged by close partnerships with manufacturers and feedback from customers.

Nordic BioSite’s company strapline, By Your Side™, defines a company ethos of partnering life science customers, helping to find the right products and services to help reach chosen goals across the whole spectrum of biotech research areas.

Nordic BioSite also operates as a CRO through its Finnish-based cGLP laboratory, BioSiteHisto. This offers a wide range of leading-edge research-based custom laboratory services including histology, immunochemistry, and in vitro research and testing, antibody optimization, antibody conjugation and predesigned adenylated linkers for Next Generation sequencing.

About ZymoPURE™ and Zyppy™

Contestants in the Spin to Win competition were working with Zymo Research ZymoPURE™ midi- and maxi-prep, or Zyppy™ MiniPrep kits supplied by Nordic BioSite.

The ZymoPURE kits can routinely recover ≥1 µg/µL plasmid DNA directly from a microcentrifuge column for transfection and other sensitive downstream applications. The kits can purify endotoxin-free plasmid DNA within 18 minutes when used with vacuum manifold and are also compatible with swinging bucket centrifuge).

ZymoPURE uses a basic three-step process of Bind (rapid loading onto a spin column via vacuum or centrifuge), Wash (for ultra-pure endotoxin-free DNA) and Elute (for transfection ready plasmid DNA).

The Zyppy™ MiniPrep kit features a pellet-free modified alkaline lysis method that bypasses bacterial culture centrifugation and resuspension, allowing endotoxin-free high-quality plasmid DNA to be obtained in under ten minutes.

ZymoPURE™ and Zyppy™ kits are compatible with plasmid DNA ≤25 kb. All kits are delivered with colored buffers for easy visualization and identification of complete bacterial cell lysis and neutralization. Typical yields (dependent on plasmid copy number, culture growth conditions and E.coli strain) are summarized below.

	Zippy Miniprep	ZymoPURE MidiPrep	ZymoPURE MaxiPrep
Processing Time	8 min	18 min	18 min
Plasmid DNA Yield*	≤ 25μg	≤ 300μg	≤ 1.2mg
Recovery volume	≤ 30μL	≤ 100μL	≤ 200μL
Recommended sample volume	600 μL	50 mL	150 mL