Blog
Educational material, comparison studies and publications on SPR and other related techniques for researchers.
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Technical Guide: Conducting In Vitro Assays with Transmembrane Proteins
Transmembrane proteins account for approximately 50% of the total mass in a lipid bilayer and serve as front line communicators and transporters. Transmembrane proteins (TMPs) are integral membrane proteins permanently attached to a biological membrane. TMPs typically contain three major regions – an extracellular domain, membrane domain and an intracellular domain. Although TMPs are prevalent […]
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Publication – OpenSPR Binding Data Reveals a Novel Approach to Treat Chronic Itch
Chronic itch associated diseases such as eczema and psoriasis will affect over 20% of human beings during their lifetime (Adikaram et al., 2019). And yet, there are surprisingly few anti-chronic itch drugs available. Those that do exist usually come with unwanted side effects such as somnolence, weight gain and gastrointestinal symptoms (Yosipovitch, Rosen, and Hashimoto, […]
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Cut Your Lab Instrument Downtime to 0 Using OpenSPR™
Having the right tools is essential for any profession. A chef cannot cook without knives, and a carpenter cannot build without a hammer. The same is also true for scientific researchers. Having the correct lab instrumentation to perform your experiments is key to publishing, and replacing or fixing these tools is not easy. Instruments tend […]
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How to Write a Successful Grant Proposal
You’re passionate about your research. Your work is crucial for scientific discovery and deserves to be carried out. We know that, and we love what you’re doing. So why can it be so challenging for academic researchers to obtain research funding? At Nicoya, we speak with researchers all over the world. We hear the same […]
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5 Tips on Getting Published in a High-Impact Journal
How do you define success as an academic researcher? We’ve spoken with thousands of academic researchers, and their end goal is almost always the same – getting published. Publishing papers in academic journals is just as crucial for a graduate student to show their worth as it is for an assistant professor who is hoping […]
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App Note: Binding Kinetics of Protein-Protein Interactions using OpenSPR™
Are protein binding kinetics important for your research? Benchtop SPR is a user-friendly tool that allows researchers to characterize biomolecular interactions in real-time measurements. Forget CO-IPs that takes days to run and only give end-point measurements, or techniques that use too much precious sample like ITC. In this blog post, we discuss how OpenSPR™ can […]
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4 Types of Binding Assays You Can Do With SPR
Whether you’re designing novel antibodies for your groundbreaking vaccine work or you’re breaking down a key pathway in cancer metastasis, you know the importance of understanding how the components of your system are interacting. At this point you have achieved great results from the preliminary stages of your interaction research workflow – you’ve identified a […]
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Improving SPR Data Quality: Controls, Design and Optimization
Accuracy, precision and reproducibility are the three most important principles in scientific research. When conducting an experiment using any technique and under any condition, these three principles will be the dividing lines between an accepted manuscript or a rejected one. Nicoya’s OpenSPR instrument measures binding kinetics in real-time and in a label-free manner. However, physical […]
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New Publication – OpenSPR Binding Data Establishes A Novel In Vivo Imaging Technique
For decades, Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) has been used as a novel cell and molecular biology tool with applications in imaging and reporting assays. Notably, expression and localization of proteins of interest can be tracked live in vivo using a GFP fusion tag. However, the limitation to using GFP fusions include the restriction of resolution […]
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Technical Guide: Comparing SPR and QCM
Selecting the right lab equipment for your projects is always a challenge. With the number of techniques providing similar data, it can be difficult to determine which is most applicable to your work. In this respect, if your research involves measuring film thickness, swelling, fouling, deposition and/or self-assembly, surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and quartz crystal […]