Producing specialized media for specific primary cell types may be best outsourced to specialized manufacturers in order to obtain optimal results for this type of cell culture, more tricky than standard cell line handling. Cell Applications, a GMP certified experienced manufacturer of human and animal primary cells, has developed media carefully optimized for the characteristics and requirements unique to their cells. Their expertise in the domain ensures optimal culture performance with thoroughly QC tested products. This post focuses on their media optimized for smooth muscle cells, and is aimed at helping you choose among the various media formats and related reagents for a complete cell culture tool box.

Tropical and vector-borne diseases account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases, causing more than 1 million deaths annually. Recognizing infected patients early in their clinical course is critical to researchers working in developing tools to prevent outbreaks. Meridian offer a range of antigens and antibodies suitable for the development of sensitive and specific immunoassays that detect tropical and vector-borne diseases. Their antibody pairs have already been validated in various immunoassays. You won’t waste time finding the right match, it has already been validated for you.

In the first part of this post, I’d like to introduce a selection of ready-to-use antibody pairs available for the main tropical and vector-borne diseases such as Chikungunya, Dengue, Ebola, Leishmania, Malaria, Yellow fever and Zika to name but a few. I’ll focus in the second part on Flavivirus immunoassay development with troubleshooting and usage tips coming from Meridian scientists to help overcoming high epitope cross-reactivity, a common issue in this specific virus family.

Working with primary cells can be tricky at times. It’s always best to know in advance what essential markers your cell model does express not to waste time and efforts in working with an inappropriate model. Cell Applications, GMP certified Primary cells provider, has understood this need and provides pre-screened cells for a variety of models: endothelial cells, skelettal muscle cells and pre-adipocytes. This post will focus on endothelial cells, ranging from human dermal and lung microvascular endothelial cells, aortic or umbilical vein cells, including pulmonary artery endothelial Cells from asthma patients. Which biomarkers were tested on these cells? How was expression assessed and what are the cell formats available? This post will tell you more about it, and will suggest related products in this field that may also be of interest to you.

I just want to briefly outline in this post the power of antibody microarray when it comes to time and cost saving as well as versatility. Whether you want to do multiple profiling or quantitative studies, if you have access to only limited sample volume, if you work with “rare samples”, if you have access to laser scanner or just to a CCD camera… there is one format suited to your multiplex protein study. The whole experiment is extremely easy to perform but nothing stops you from outsourcing it to experts for the price of an extra ELISA :=). I picked as example for this post the popular inflammation arrays to illustrate the technology and give you some price examples to convince you that it’s not more expensive than an ELISA!