50 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
ANGELA KOEHLER
Institute Fellow in the Chemical Biology
Program at the Broad Institute and a Group
Leader for the National Cancer Institute’s
Initiative for Chemical Genetics. She is also
a Project Leader in the NCI Cancer Target
Discovery and Development (CTD2) Center
at the Broad Institute aimed at targeting
causal cancer genes with small molecules.KRYSTYN VAN VLIET
Associate Provost and the Michael and Sonja
Koerner Professor of Materials Science and
Engineering and Biological Engineering at
MIT. She is also the Director of Manufacturing
Innovation at MIT’s Innovation Initiative,
and Lead of the Singapore-MIT Alliance
for Research & Technology BioSystems &
Micromechanics team.THE JUDGES
H. STEVEN WILEY
Senior Research Scientist and Laboratory Fellow
at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
He published some of the earliest computer
models of receptor regulation and is known for
developing a variety of quantitative biochemical
and optical assays as a basis for validating
computational models of cell processes.FENG ZHANG
Core member of the Broad Institute of MIT
and Harvard and the James and Patricia
Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at
MIT. He is also an associate professor in
the Departments of Brain and Cognitive
Sciences and Biological Engineering at MIT.Editor’s Note: The judges considered dozens of entries submitted for a variety of life-science products by companies and users. The judging panel is completely independent of The Scientist, and its members
were invited to participate based on their familiarity with life-science tools and technologies. They have no financial ties to the products or companies involved in the competition. In this issue of The Scientist,
any advertisements placed by winners named in this article were purchased after our independent judges selected the winning products and had no bearing on the outcome of the competition.BD BD AbSeq Assay
This technology enables researchers to simul-
taneously analyze RNA and protein expression
in thousands of individual cells. Released com-
mercially this July, the BD Life Sciences AbSeq
Assay, for use with the BD Rhapsody single-cell
analysis system, couples antibodies with oligo-
nucleotides to estimate the abundances of pro-
teins in cells from high-throughput sequencing
runs. The antibody-oligonucleotide conjugates
are sold as single-vial matrix tubes and are easy
to scale for standard 2-microliter sample tests,
which provide results on protein expression that
are similar to flow cytometry data.
This combination of mRNA and protein
data makes the AbSeq Assay powerful. Some
single-cell, RNA-sequencing tools can’t provide
a thorough analysis of the cells due to ineffi-
cient mRNA capture as well as mRNA instability
and turnover, says John Chang, an immunology
researcher at the University of California, San
Diego, who uses the BD AbSeq Assay in his lab
to study lymphocyte function during immuneresponses. “Assays that enable simultaneous
analysis of RNA and proteins in the same single
cells, such as BD AbSeq, can overcome this limi-
tation and can lead to more accurate and com-
prehensive insights in many biologic systems.”
Specifically, notes Steve Kulisch, BD’s
vice president of marketing for the product,
researchers can begin to figure out how cancer
patients’ tumors interact with their immune
systems, data that have the potential to
provide more-powerful, individualized cancer
treatments. Currently the assay scans for a
little more than 100 different combinations
of human antibody-oligonucleotides, and
more are in development, which should help
researchers tease apart the intricacies of
complex diseases without having to run more
than one experiment.
Twenty-five tests cost $375, and the whole
set-up runs $10,000 to $50,000, which breaks
down to 10 to 18 cents a cell, depending on the
experimental design, Kulisch says.WILEY: “Uses antibodies to cell surface
markers that have nucleotide tags attached
to them so that you can easily distinguish
different cell types in single-cell RNA-Seq
experiments and compare results to flow
cytometry results. A useful and innovative
extension of antibody labeling and detection
technologies. One of the first commercializa-
tions of this relatively new technology.”