BOSTON, MA -- Northeastern University, and Professor Barry L. Karger, Director of the Barnett Institute of Chemical and Biological Analysis at Northeastern University, and Applied Biosystems Group (NYSE:ABI), an Applera Corporation business, today announced a collaboration to explore advanced approaches in separations technology to enable new highly automated high-throughput systems for the analysis of proteins and peptides for proteomics. Current protein and peptide separation strategies have limitations in throughput and integration capability with new advanced analytical techniques. In addition, there is a need to improve the ability to separate and resolve all classes of proteins. This new collaboration will focus on enhancing the throughput, sensitivity of detection, and automation of the protein separation process including the use of new separations technology. The collaboration builds upon an existing exclusive licensing agreement announced by Applied Biosystems and Northeastern University in April 2001. Applied Biosystems obtained an exclusive licensing agreement to Northeastern University’s vacuum deposition interface developed by Dr. Karger and his colleagues. This new technology is expected to help address key challenges facing proteomics today, including the need for rapid identification and quantitation of low concentrations of proteins contained in complex samples such as human tissue and serum. The vacuum deposition technology is expected to enable a higher degree of integration between advanced high performance separations systems such as liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis with MALDI mass spectrometry. "The integration of advanced separation technology with our protein analysis systems should move us toward our goal of providing complete proteomic research systems to further enable protein analysis," said Stephen A. Martin, Ph.D., Director of the Proteomics Research Center at Applied Biosystems. "Dr. Karger and his colleagues at Northeastern University have one of the leading research programs in the area of biomolecular separation and we are excited to be collaborating with them on this important project. Professor Karger commented, "I am very pleased to collaborate with Applied Biosystems, a leader in biomolecular instrumentation. This collaboration will provide a facile means for a wide dissemination of our technologies."