Quality assurance for antimicrobial devices.

Quality assurance (QA) of products with antimicrobial claims is still a virgin field for medical devices. As the market pushes the development of new devices with antimicrobial properties there is rapidly growing interest in antimicrobial testing. QA systems for antimicrobial device testing are discussed here.

Design of helical proteins for real-time endoprotease assays.

Proteases play a key role in cellular biology and have become priority targets for new pharmaceuticals. Thus, there is a high demand for specific, sensitive, and quick assays to monitor the activity of endoproteases. We designed affinity-tagged helical proteins with unique protease cleavage sites and thus constructed universal, molecularly defined, and uniform substrates for in vitro detection of IgA endoprotease.