AssayWise Letters 2014, Vol. 3(1)

Sphingomyelinase Assays
Sphingomyelinase (SMase) is an enzyme that is responsible for cleaving sphingomyelin (SM) to phosphocholine and ceramide. Activation of SMases in cells plays an important role in the cellular responses.…

Tide Fluor™ Dyes, Optimized FRET Donors
Although EDANS, FAM, TAMRA, ROX, Cy3® and Cy5® have been widely used to develop a variety of FRET peptide and FRET oligonucleotide probes, there are still some limitations in the use of these dyes. For example, the weak absorption and environment sensitive fluorescence of EDANS have severely limited…

Tide Quencher™ Dyes, Optimized FRET Acceptors
Although DABCYL has been used to develop a variety of FRET applications, its low quenching efficiency of longer wavelength dyes (such as fluoresceins, rhodamines and cyanines) has limited its use in the development of sensitive fluorogenic FRET probes.Additionally, the absorption spectrum of…

Cal-520™, the Best Green Fluorescent Ca2+ Dye
Cal-520™ provides the most robust homogeneous fluorescence based assay tool for detecting intracellular calcium mobilization.Cal-520™ AM is a new fluorogenic calcium-sensitive dye with a significantly improved signal to background ratio and intracellular retention compared to the existing…

California Red™ & SunRed™ Superior Replacements for Texas Red® and Texas Red®-X
Although sulforhodamine 101 acid chloride (also called Texas Red®) is the most popular labeling reagent of sulfonyl chlorides, it is quite unstable in water, especially at the higher pH required for reactions with aliphatic amines.Texas Red® reacts with both aliphatic amines and aromatic amines…

Click Chemistry Building Blocks
"Click Chemistry" is a term introduced by K. B. Sharpless in 2001 to describe reactions that are high in yields, wide in scope, and create only by-products that can be removed without chromatography.Click chemistry reactions are stereospecific, simple to perform and can be conducted in easily removable…