Hadfield, UK – 16 December 2022 – UK genomics company, RevoluGen Ltd. is pleased to announce it has entered into a non-exclusive distribution agreement with BioEntist of Thailand for the distribution of its Fire Monkey™ High Molecular Weight (HMW)-DNA extraction product range.

Under the terms of the agreement, RevoluGen has granted BioEntist the rights to promote, market and sell Fire Monkey products to its molecular biology users in Thailand. BioEntist is a leading life science distributor of complete workflow products in molecular biology that will accelerate the commercialisation of Fire Monkey in the vibrant Far East commercial and research markets for DNA sequencing and genomics.

Fire Monkey is the world’s first spin ­column based Nucleic Acid Isolation and Purification (NAIP) kit that extracts highly pure, long-length DNA, the important first step in DNA sequencing. It performs HMW-DNA extraction and simultaneous size selection from bacterial and animal cells. Taking just one hour to perform, the Fire Monkey protocol results in average DNA strand lengths of appx. 100kb. 

Mr. Sarawut Saephoo, CEO at BioEntist said, “With more labs looking to sequence DNA for both academic and the burgeoning genomics applications, there is an increasing need to extract high molecular weight DNA with the flexibility of hybrid sequencing protocols. In customer tests, RevoluGen’s HMW DNA extraction outperformed competitor technologies and we are thus delighted to add the Fire Monkey products to our sequencing range.”

RevoluGen’s patent-protected technology is derived from a spin-column based protocol to extract HMW-DNA using a high g-force but which does not break down the long and fragile DNA molecules as much as standard spin-column technologies. Fire Monkey produces DNA fragments of an average 100kb in length that are not too short and not too long and are found to be in a relatively tightly defined range of lengths. The Fire Monkey extract has so few small fragments that separate size selection steps are usually not required and so few very long fragments that separate fragmentation steps are also generally not required. This selectivity improves the overall sequencing results by not wasting as much sequencing resources on either reading the less useful small fragments or blocking the pores or wells with fragments that are too long. 

The Fire Monkey technology can also be size tuned into producing DNA fragments in very tight bands of smaller lengths below its standard 100kb average DNA extract length. This tuning can be dialled down to produce the average DNA extract length most suitable for optimal throughput performance of leading sequencing technologies. 

Dr Georgios Patsos, inventor of the Fire Monkey technology and CSO at RevoluGen said, “Being a familiar and user-friendly spin column process, Fire Monkey is ideal for extraction of DNA for on all sequencing platforms giving users the benefit of one extraction for both their initial short­-read sequencing and for any subsequent long­-read sequencing that can therefore be performed on exactly the same original sample without any further cost, re­processing problems or potential handling errors. By only needing to do one extraction rather than two it can reduce sample handling and storage significantly enabling cost effective hybrid assemblies.” 

In addition to this agreement RevoluGen has non-exclusive distribution agreements with Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany for global distribution through its MilliporeSigma division and with Welgene, for the Taiwanese market. 

The DNA sequencing market is currently predicted to grow from $7bn to some $50bn over the next 10 years. 

RevoluGen’s Fire Monkey HMW-DNA extraction kit

Copyright: RevoluGen

Workshop

BioEntist will be introducing Fire Monkey HMW DNA extraction technology to its BioCommunity at a workshop in Bangkok (and online) on 28 January 9-3pm, where RevoluGen’s CSO, Dr Georgios Patsos will be available for an online Q&A. For more details and to register to attend, click HERE