NOV.11– NEW HAVEN, Conn–Molecular Staging Inc. (MSI) has received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant award from the Department of Energy (DOE) to develop methods for microbial DNA amplification using their proprietary Multiple Displacement Amplification (MDA) technology.

MSI has also received an additional SBIR grant to develop a biomarker chip for enhanced diagnosis of osteoarthritis.

Funding for the grant comes from the DOE’s Genomes to Life program. The plan for this program is to use DNA sequences from microbes and higher organisms, including humans, as starting points for systematically tackling questions about the essential process of living systems. The approach will foster an integrated and predictive understanding of biological systems and offer insights into how both microbial and human cells respond to environmental changes.

One of the challenges of this project is that often there is not enough microbial DNA to enable analysis. Currently, to obtain sufficient DNA, microbes need to be isolated and cultured in a time consuming and labor-intensive approach and some microbes are simply unculturable.

The goal of the research grant is to develop the MDA technology to generate sufficient DNA from single, unculturable microbes in order to produce complete genome sequences and enable the DOE to further their research.