Biotium, a leading innovator of fluorescent dyes for life science research, has launched its new BactoView dead stains and BactoView viability kits. These products were designed for easy usage and improved dead cell selectivity for enhanced microbial viability determination. With precise dead cell detection being vital for accurate analysis, BactoView dead stains deliver significant improvements in this procedure.
Unlike the traditional viability dyes propidium iodide and ethidium homodimer, the new dead stains provide brighter dead cell staining with minimal background interference. The specially designed chemical structures of the dyes effectively exclude them from live cells of both gram-negative and particularly gram-positive strains, selectively labeling dead cells. There is only a single 30-minute staining step with no additional wash requirements for ease-of-use, with the flexibility of seven available dye colors ranging from green to near-IR for microscopy or flow cytometry analysis.
BactoView dead stains also are included in two new BactoView viability kits, enabling convenient two-colour staining of both live and dead bacteria for clear viability assessment of all cells in a sample. Each kit includes a BactoView dead stain, with either red or far-red fluorescence for dead cell labeling, and a BactoView viability green counterstain for staining both live and dead bacteria. The kits are compatible with gram-positive and gram-negative strains and need only a single half-hour incubation without washing, offering both flexibility and convenience.
"These dyes and kits are a much-needed improvement for microbiological research, particularly for gram-positive stains that don’t work well with existing dead cell dyes," Biotium’s director of Bioscience, Dr Lori Roberts, comments.
