Welcome

Dear Scientists,

A lot has changed since our last issue. COVID-19 pandemic turned our world upside down and unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it’s going to disappear any time soon. We’ve learned to juggle work and teaching our kids algebra, the ins and outs of online grocery ordering, and how to make our own personalized masks.

One positive side effect of the pandemic is that science has been shown to be the key for finding solutions to the world’s challenges. You should all be proud of being part of a scientific community that makes people’s lives better—perhaps not in a pandemic sense, but certainly by helping to ensure that justice is served.

Promega has been busy during the pandemic, providing reagents and raw materials to those on the front lines of COVID-19 test and vaccine development. We also launched our Spectrum Compact CE System. This system is a small, affordable benchtop instrument suitable for Sanger Sequencing and Fragment Analysis. It is designed for use of existing 5- and 6-dye STR commercially available kits—be sure to check it out!

We have more product updates to share, like the Casework Direct System –a kit designed to rapidly process swabs from touch DNA casework samples or cuttings of sexual assault swabs and stained clothing, saving you time and cumbersome steps.

Interested in adopting MPS? Our PowerSeq® product family is designed to ease your transition to MPS. Our latest PowerSeq® kits, the PowerSeq® 46GY System, contains reagents to amplify familiar autosomal and Y-STR loci as small amplicons (140–300bp) that can be used to prepare MPS libraries and generate sequencing data compatible with Illumina® TruSeq® and MiSeq® technologies.

One of our European colleagues had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Lutz Roewer for an interview where he gave an update on what’s going on in the world of Y-STR analysis. Did you know that the ISFG just recently published guidelines on the interpretation of Y-STR results which are valid world-wide? Learn more by watching the video.

We’ve also included a profile on one of our rockstar Product Managers, Anupama Gopalakrishnan. Anupama was the Marketing lead on the project teams that launched the Casework Direct System and the PowerSeq® 46GY System.

And finally, we give you an update on upcoming meetings—most of them virtual, thanks to COVID-19! But with luck we’ll see you in person soon!

Have ideas for an article in a future issue? Drop me a line at ann.macphetridge@promega.com.

Enjoy reading and stay well!