A High-Temperature, High-Throughput Method for Monitoring Residual Formaldehyde in Vaccine Formulations.

Formaldehyde has long been used in the chemical inactivation of viral material during vaccine production. Viral inactivation is required so that the vaccine does not infect the patient. Formaldehyde is diluted during the vaccine manufacturing process, but residual quantities of formaldehyde are still present in some current vaccines.

Effect of liquid-handling accuracy on assay performance.

This study illustrates how optimization of both liquid-handling accuracy and precision is critical to assay performance. The study was designed to examine (1) liquid-handling performance and (2) the effect of liquid-handling variability on two types of in vitro biochemical assays by making small but deliberate changes to assay volume delivery. Specifically, protein binding (streptavidin) and enzyme (α-galactosidase) assays were investigated by determining the effect of assay volume for each assay component.

Bulky adamantanethiolate and cyclohexanethiolate ligands favor smaller gold nanoparticles with altered discrete sizes.

Use of bulky ligands (BLs) in the synthesis of metal nanoparticles (NPs) gives smaller core sizes, sharpens the size distribution, and alters the discrete sizes. For BLs, the highly curved surface of small NPs may facilitate growth, but as the size increases and the surface flattens, NP growth may terminate when the ligand monolayer blocks BLs from transporting metal atoms to the NP core. Batches of thiolate-stabilized Au NPs were synthesized using equimolar amounts of 1-adamantanethiol (AdSH), cyclohexanethiol (CySH), or n-hexanethiol (C6SH).

Development of a fluorescence resonance energy transfer assay for measuring the activity of Streptococcus pneumoniae DNA ligase, an enzyme essential for DNA replication, repair, and recombination.

DNA ligase is an enzyme essential for DNA replication, repair, and recombination in all organisms. Bacterial DNA ligases catalyze a NAD(+)-dependent DNA ligation reaction, i.e.