Most of you are probably back to work after the ASM conference in San Diego. It was a great conference with a lot of exciting talks and posters and we hope you enjoyed our beautiful city.

We would like to send out some special thanks to researchers who collaborated with us to make this one of MO BIO’s best meetings ever.

Seminar presentation:

MO BIO would like to thank Dr. Janet Jansson for an excellent seminar Monday evening at the Hyatt. Her breadth of projects spanning from Crohn’s disease to the oil spill in the gulf makes one wonder if she ever sleeps. The seminar is available for viewing now.

Poster presentations:

We would also like to thank the labs that collaborated with us to generate data for posters we presented.

	Dr. Charles Lee, from the Craig Cary Lab, worked with us for months generating data from time course experiments and using soil collected from Antarctica to analyze the effects of LifeGuard Soil Preservation Solution on RNA isolation. It was a great body of work that was an incredible effort.
	Dr. Chris Kitts and Alice Hamrick helped us to ask some important questions about the differences in microbial populations isolated using different bead beating methods (vortex vs. the PowerLyzer 24 Homogenizer). Two undergraduates, Victoria Valencia and Mira Elnan, did numerous T-RFLP experiments to analyze the results from 6 different soils. In the end, we found that actually, bias seen with DNA extraction has a lot more to do with the soil than the DNA extraction method!
	MO BIO Labs presented a poster on a novel method for isolating DNA and RNA from biofilms. This project was a collaboration with several researchers around the globe working with various biofilms with ranging levels of difficulty in lysis and inhibitor content.
	And our final poster examined the quantitative effects of IRT on humic acid contaminated samples and the effects on both qPCR and RT-PCR.

It was a great experience to be at ASM and representing our scientific endeavors during the poster sessions with all of you, our customers. Thanks to everyone who came by our booth and posters.

How can you work with the MO BIO R&D team?

We were asked by a few people, how does one get the opportunity to collaborate with MO BIO and do a poster together?  It’s easy. Just contact me at technical@mobio.com or skennedy@mobio.com and we’ll discuss it.

We have questions we want to ask and are always looking for labs with undergraduates who need a cool project to do. Or if your student has an idea for a project and needs support and direction, we can help there too.

In addition, if you want to be involved in evaluating new methods for MO BIO and be on our beta-testing team, let us know. We always have new methods and ideas that need outside validation. And this is a great way to get your foot in the door for a career in biotech. By collaborating with a biotech company and learning the ropes of how we look at science and form questions from a commercial stand point, it will help make your resume much more attractive to industry hiring managers.

We hope to see you all at ASM 2011 in New Orleans, LA. Start planning now!

~Suzanne