Recent Patents on Biotechnology - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2013

Patents in some biotechnological fields are controversial. Despite this fact, the number of patent applications increases every year. Total revenues in the global biotechnology market are expected to increase in the middle term. Nowadays, the bioeconomy is an important socio-economic area, which is reflected in the number of firms dedicated to or using biotechnology. The exploitation of biotechnological patents is an essential Read More

Sarcomas are a class of tumors defined by their mesenchymal origin that comprise very different neoplasms. Although some sarcomas harbor pathogenomic molecular alterations (i.e. specific balanced translocations and their associated chimeric fusion genes), others still lack an ultimate diagnostic tool, which could be of great interest as in some cases different sarcomas share a similar clinical manifestation. High through Read More

The methodological aspects are here presented for the NAPPA (Nucleic Acid Programmable Protein Arrays) characterization by atomic force microscopy and anodic porous alumina. Anodic Porous Alumina represents also an advanced on chip laboratory for gene expression contained in an engineered plasmid vector. The results obtained with CdK2, CDKN1A, p53 and Jun test genes expressed on NAPPA and the future dev Read More

Protein function prediction is one of the most challenging problems in the post-genomic era. The number of newly identified proteins has been exponentially increasing with the advances of the high-throughput techniques. However, the functional characterization of these new proteins was not incremented in the same proportion. To fill this gap, a large number of computational methods have been proposed in the literature. Read More

Over the last decade, proteomics has undergone remarkable progress thanks to the technical advances made in the field. Improvements in the design of the protein microarrays, including more types of chemical groups for surface functionalization, new capture agents and novel detection strategies, among others, have allowed the detection of proteins in a robust, specific, sensitive, real time and high throughput manner. Read More

Cordyceps, a well-known traditional Chinese medicine, is an endoparasitic and/or symbiotic macrofungus in the body of insect and other arthropod, and has received increasing attention worldwide due to its rarity and outstanding curative effects for different diseases. Recent years, however, the counterfeits and mimics of Cordyceps are frequently found in markets because of its scarce in nature and high in price. Therefore, quali Read More