Enhancing a sustainable biomedical research environment
Biomatrica is an innovative molecular biology company creating new technologies that harness nature’s unique long-term preservation methodology of certain multi-cellular organisms. Biomatrica’s proprietary technology platform provides long-term preservation and storage of nucleic acids (RNA, DNA, clones, bacteria, blood, tissues, cells, etc) at ambient room temperature. When adopted, the technology enables research institutions to reduce their energy costs and carbon footprint, minimize storage costs of an institution’s large collections of biological samples, while protecting these valuable assets from degradation, quality reduction and avoidable mishaps/loss.
Paradigm-changing solution
- A pilot study at Stanford University provided an initial evaluation of this technology and the cost savings in a potential adoption or deployment of such technology to ~10 Million biological sample collections in cold storage campus-wide (1). In the Stanford study, the projected 10-year cost savings were ~$16M (total costs), >200,000 Million BTUs in energy savings, and >18,000 tons of reduced CO2 emission. These results are highlighted in the chart below
- Jensen, G. Fact Sheet: Room temperature storage saves energy
- For more information about Biomatrica's Sustainability "Green" program, please check out this link.
Scientific Evaluations of Biomatrica’s technology
Room temperature-based storage of nucleic acids has been evaluated by various researchers in the academic, government and forensic laboratories. The studies have been evaluated against the current storage method of cold-freezers (low and ultra-low temperature), in terms of the yield and quality of the recovered biological materials, as well as impact (if any) on downstream analysis such as PCR, microarray and sequencing experiments.
- Example: Comparison of gel images of PCR results of DNA extracted from tissues stabilized in DNAgard at room temperature versus cold-stored samples at -80C.
- Steven Wilkinson, Billy Law, Scott Whitney, Laurent Coulon, Omo Clement, Lutfunnessa Shireen, Angela Stassinopoulus, Judy Muller-Cohn and Rolf Muller. Innovative technology to stabilize DNA in tissues and cells at room temperature. Poster presentation at the 2010 Experimental Biology Conference, Anaheim, CA. April 24-28, 2010.
- A detailed compilation of research studies comparing room temperature storage of nucleic acids (RNA and DNA) with cold storage at -200C and -800C can be downloaded in the link here.
Biomatrica Products for the Research market
Biomatrica has developed a range of products for room temperature stabilization and shipping of tissues, cells, biopsy materials, blood or bacterial strains from collection site to the laboratory for analysis. Some of these products are listed within links below, including some pending release(s):
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Key Customers
- Stanford University
- University of California San Diego
- University of California Davis
- NIH
- US Army
Scientific References
- Thomas Doedt, QIAsafeTM DNA - An innovative Anhydrobiosis-based technology for long-term storage of DNA Proceedings of the workshop on Long-term storage of DNA Material, August 2009.
- Bruce Budowle and Angela van Daal, Extracting evidence from forensic DNA analyses: future molecular biology directions, Biotechniques, 2009, 46 (5), 339-350.
- Green technologies for room temperature nucleic acid storage, E. Wan, M. Akana, J. Pons, J. Chen, S. Musone, P.-Y. Kwok, W. Liao, Curr. Issues Mol. Biol., 2009, 12: 135-142.
Contact
An overview and inter-connectedness of our solutions to biomedical research is located at the link here. For more information, please email us at contact@biomatrica.com, or call us at 1-866-379-6879.
