It’s MO BIO’s 16th birthday! To celebrate 16 years of creating and producing new products for nucleic acid isolation we’d like to share with you 10 interesting facts about the company and it’s founders, and give you, our loyal fans, an amazing discount offer as a birthday present and drop in a word from our CEO and CFO.

First, 10 little known facts about MO BIO Labs

1. MO BIO’s first product was the UltraClean 15 DNA Purification Kit for DNA clean up of PCR reactions and agarose gel slices.

2. MO BIO Labs CEO, Mark Brolaski, was one of the original inventors of the first ever commercial product for DNA clean up, Gene Clean, and a co-founder of the company BIO 101.

3. MO BIO Labs manufactures everything right in our own buildings. Every bead tube is made right here.

4. MO BIO products are currently being used for samples collected by the Human Microbiome Project (see page 7-25).

5. MO BIO has been a proud sponsor of the Water is Life program since 2007. A percentage of sales from all the water products (both PCR water and Water DNA and RNA Isolation Kits) are donated to Water Partners International, who is committed to providing clean drinking water in developing countries.

6. The owners of MO BIO, Mark and Liz Brolaski competed in professional tandem surf events  in San Diego in the early ’90’s, and in 1991 won $400 for this award winning pose (picture right).

7. Mark Brolaski took classes with Lyle Turner (former CEO of Invitrogen) while they were both undergraduates at UCSD. Later on, Mark took a position at Scripps Research Institute as a research technician and Liz was working at Scripps as a purchasing agent, when Joe Sorge (founder of Stratagene) became an assistant professor.

8. MO BIO has changed locations three times in the last 16 years. The original office was in Encinitas and minutes from the ocean. We moved again in Encinitas before settling in here at our Carlsbad office in 2005. The current office here in Carlsbad is located only about 1 mile away from Life Technologies.

9. MO BIO received their first patent on Inhibitor Removal Technology this past March 2009 which allows for all types of inhibitors from environmental samples and clinical samples to be removed before DNA and RNA isolation to ensure PCR and RT-PCR success!

10. The name of the company, “MO BIO”, was created by Mark Brolaski and I asked him to elaborate for our readers on how he decided on the name. He tells us:

“The name was conceived during a late night brain storming session.  It’s short for molecular biology and rolls off the tongue a little easier than MOL BIO. We have had lots of people ask how we came up with the name and to be honest, I could not believe the name had not already been used. Doesn’t everyone call molecular biology “Mo Bio” for short? Our company is dedicated to making tools in this field so the name has worked out pretty well.”

Makes sense to us!

Special birthday offer… 16% off!

To thank you for being a part of our journey and in honor of our 16th year, we are offering a 16% discount off web orders only. Use the promo code “16 years” to receive the special discount.  This offer is only good until October 16th so act fast. We look forward to celebrating many more anniversaries with you!

A word from our founders

Finally a message to you, our most loyal fans from MO BIO CEO and CFO,  Mark and Liz Brolaski:

“It’s been an incredible ride and MO BIO has enjoyed every year of getting to know all of the scientists we speak to at conferences and through the Where in the World program. We love hearing about your success and sharing in the excitement of your results. Thank you for sticking with us through the years.

It has been really wonderful to have contributed ever so slightly to the research efforts of some of the world’s best scientists. We are proud to be able to partner with you in your pursuit of scientific discovery. We encourage all of our customers to visit our location whenever they are in the area, and of course, when we are at tradeshows. You are our customers and we want you to be a part of our community! ”

Thanks Mark and Liz!

Thanks for visiting our blog today. We love feedback. Please send us your comments and let us know how long you’ve been a MO BIO customer and what your favorite MO BIO product is!

Thanks for reading,

Suzanne (follow me on http://twitter.com/SuzyScientist)

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Fun Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Why not leave a response, and share your opinion?