Brewers and Winemakers

Proxima helps brewers and winemakers elevate their products to the next level by providing a suite of affordable and rapid turnaround analytical services. Proxima’s starch, total carbohydrate, and fermentable carbohydrate assays allow our customers to easily track the course of their fermentations and help them develop new recipes. Our unique microscopy and microbiology services accurately and quickly diagnose brightness and clarity issues and microbial contamination.

Proxima also offers a wide range of customizable assays and tests including analysis of thiols, terpenes, alcohols, esters, and other flavor compounds; both in finished beer and wine as well as in hops, malt, must, and grapes.

Using high-throughput small scale fermentations in our lab we allow customers to rapidly screen, evaluate, and select the optimal yeast stains and ingredients for their desired product. We have extensive expertise in yeast biology and genetics, and we are experts at the use of CRISPR and other technologies for creation of modified yeast for a variety of food and beverage applications.

Biofuels and Bioproducts

Proxima helps our clients to unleash the potential in biofuels and bioproducts as alternatives to fossil-fuel derived energy and materials. We are experts at developing specialized media and isolation pipelines for microorganisms with applications in food, biofuel, bioproducts, and bioremediation. This includes the ability to test, select for, and improve the ability of microorganisms to metabolize specific substrates.

Our small-scale high-throughput fermentation capabilities and expertise in assay development allow clients to select optimum strains for production of biofuel and bioproducts. We also deploy cutting edge DNA sequencing, genetic manipulation, and bioinformatic techniques, including CRISPR, to accelerate selection, modification, creation, or optimization of organisms. These capabilities allow our clients to increase or eliminate specific metabolites or achieve high-yield production of bioproducts or recombinant proteins.

Our knowledge of biochemistry assists customers in design and optimization of enzymatic processes such as starch hydrolysis. Proxima is also able to design and implement novel purification strategies at small to medium scale for bioproducts including enzymes, proteins, and polysaccharides. Proxima excels at detection and quantification of industrially useful enzyme activities such as cellulases, amylases, proteinases, lipases, glycosidases, and lignin-modifying enzymes.

Academic Labs and Life Sciences

We help academic labs by providing DNA vectors and protein reagents at affordable costs so precious grant dollars, and student and researcher time, are focused on their critical scientific questions. Using our QC-verified custom DNA vector and protein products ensures that research projects proceed smoothly with reliable results for both our academic and industrial life sciences clients.

Proxima helps our clients ensure their precious DNA vectors are kept safe and accurate through our line of vector archiving services. By eliminating tedious and error-prone plasmid maintenance and preparation steps we save our clients time and money and allow them to focus with confidence on what is truly important to them – their research.

Proxima also aids academic and industrial life sciences clients through our protein services. We provide custom recombinant proteins from bacterial, yeast, or mammalian cell systems with client specified purity and activity. We also provide proteins with custom conjugations allowing our clients to focus on their application without the distraction of preparing these reagents themselves.

We also perform custom experiments for clients who need equipment or expertise outside what is available in their labs. Client projects have included treatment of mammalian culture cells with a client’s compound of interest followed by qPCR and Western blot analysis, conducting chemical analysis of client samples, or immunofluorescent analysis of tissue and cell samples.

Agtech and Crop Development

Proxima helps crop development by developing and deploying high-throughput methods for analysis of protein and carbohydrate content and composition, enzyme activity, and small molecule analysis. We can assay multiple compounds and enzymes that positively or negatively affect the flavor and performance of agricultural products. Proxima can also handle sample processing for extraction and analysis of DNA, RNA, or protein at both low and high throughput.

Proxima can process and analyze animal samples for qPCR, ELISA, and other methods, to support companies developing novel feed additives and other products for use in animal agriculture. We further support research in animal agriculture through deploying a wide range of biochemical assays for a variety of metabolic markers.

We support development of value-added processes by providing affordable analysis of large sample sets to track process efficiency. We can assist in optimization of specific process steps through deployment of small-scale high-throughput reactions, extractions, and assays. Proxima also assists value-added processors through providing non-standard assays and analyses of key input feedstocks. Proxima also supports clients in the agricultural technology space by providing soil microbiome analysis and related services. These services help clients developing soil-enhancement technologies demonstrate efficacy to their customers and shareholders.