Molecular Devices

Molecular Devices is an American maker of laboratory instruments, based in San Jose, California. It sells microplate readers, imaging systems for cells and the electrophysiology equipment of Axon Instruments, which it bought in 2004, including the Axopatch 200B, the amplifier named in the methods of many nanopore papers.^[1][2][3] The company has been part of Danaher Corporation since 2010.^[4][5]

The company says it was founded in 1983 by "a leading 20th-Century physical and biophysical chemist"; the Serbian Academy of Sciences lists Harden McConnell, a chemistry professor at Stanford, as its founder and director from that year.^[1][6][7] Its first product, the Vmax, a microplate reader, appeared in 1987 and began the MAXline family. A microplate is a disposable tray of 96, 384 or 1,536 small wells, and most of the company's instruments read the results of tests run in them.^[8] In 1989 it brought out Threshold, a biosensor built on the Light Addressable Potentiometric Sensor, a semiconductor device that McConnell and two colleagues had described in Science the year before.^[9][10] The Cytosensor followed in 1992 and the SPECTRAmax 250 in 1994. In June 1996 the company bought NovelTech Systems and introduced the FLIPR (Fluorometric Imaging Plate Reader), its first high-throughput optical screening tool.^[9]

In its 2004 annual report the company listed IonWorks, PatchXpress and OpusXpress, three automated systems for patch clamping and voltage clamping, in its drug discovery family.^[8] In May 2011 the company announced that NanoRacks had chosen its SpectraMax M5e microplate reader to be the first on the International Space Station, and a reconfigured unit launched in July 2016.^[11][12]

Axon Instruments was founded in 1983 by Alan Finkel and was based in Union City, California.^[13][14] When Molecular Devices announced the purchase on March 21, 2004, Axon had 128 employees. It made electrophysiology tools, instruments that scan DNA and protein arrays, and the PatchXpress, which it introduced in 2002 as the first automated multichannel patch-clamp system.^[14][13] The deal closed in July 2004, and the annual report for that year lists the GenePix microarray scanners and the Axopatch among the company's product lines.^[8]

The Axopatch 200B is the product that matters to nanopore research. The 1996 experiment that first drove single strands of DNA through a pore recorded the current with an Axopatch 200A from "Axon Instruments, Foster City, CA".^[3] Later papers from the field give the model number and a filter setting; see Patch clamp.

MDS Inc., a Canadian company, completed its purchase of Molecular Devices in March 2007.^[15] On February 1, 2010 MDS announced that it had completed the sale of its MDS Analytical Technologies business, which included Molecular Devices, to Danaher for $650 million in cash.^[4] Molecular Devices is now an operating company in Danaher's life sciences segment, and Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, which descends from the company of Wallace H. Coulter, is owned by the same parent.^[5][16] The Coulter counter, which counts cells by the current they block, and the patch clamp, which records the current through a single channel, are sold under one roof.

Molecular Reality Corporation uses the Axopatch as its example of the expensive laboratory standard. The recordings of DNA barcodes that Bell and Keyser published in 2016, and that the company has used to train its machine-learning models, were made on one.^[17] The company's own bench uses a four-channel amplifier from Elements srl instead. In the company's atlas of the field, The Hole World, Molecular Devices is listed as an instrument maker in San Jose and drawn with a pore labelled "PatchXpress / Axopatch".^[18]

• Axopatch 200B
• Lipid bilayer
• List of nanopore companies
• Patch clamp