Solis BioDyne Renaissance: the beginning of blends, mixes and qPCR

  • Published: 23 September 2025
Our last story ended in the middle of 2005. By then, we had spent a decade developing room-temperature stable DNA polymerases for a range of applications. In the second half of that year, we reached a turning point – we started blending and mixing to help scientists around the world reduce pipetting errors and save time.

First Master Mixes

If we are honest, our first mix actually came out already around the year 2000. It was FIREPol® Master Mix Ready to Load — our first all-in-one, room-temperature stable master mix. Designed for any PCR application that will be visualized by agarose gel electrophoresis and DNA staining. The accompanying bright green tracking dye results from mixing blue (migration equivalent to 3.5-4.5 kb DNA fragment) and yellow dye (migration equivalent to 35-45 bp DNA fragment). The reason we went with this specific color of Ready to Load dye is that out of all the color options, this combination wasn’t just cost-effective—it was also the most visually appealing.

You might assume that the regular FIREPol® Master Mix was launched at the same time, but in fact, it came out 5 years later, in 2005 — right where our timeline picks up again, after several customers’ requests.

There were three key players who joined the company around that time to make magic happen in the science department – Tiiu, Jana and Piia. With their knowledge, skills and pipetting mastery, a new generation of products started getting developed.

On the sales side, Kersti was the one forging our first major collaborations. One of them, with Planta – now KWS, led to the development of a hot-start version of our FIREPol® Master Mix. It was an important milestone for agricultural research, allowing SNP genotyping.

Developing qPCR mixes

The composition of HOT FIREPol® Master Mix formed the base of our qPCR mixes, which we began developing in 2007. At the time, qPCR wasn’t just a new thing to us — it was new to the whole of Estonia and even the world. Few researchers were familiar with it, even fewer had access to the technology, and its high cost made it difficult for many labs to adopt.

Our first challenge was to find the right dye and ensure compatibility with Thermo Fisher Scientific’s qPCR machines, primers, and the ROX reference dye. It wasn't until later that other manufacturers entered the picture with their own instruments.

When it came to the dye, our brilliant colleague Kärt found the solution: EvaGreen®. It’s spectrally similar to SYBR® Green, but with its higher stability and safer-for-the-environment features, it aligned better with our company’s standards.

The University of Tartu was the first to acquire a qPCR machine in Estonia. We are especially grateful to the professors at the Faculty of Medicine and at the Faculty of Science and Technology, who allowed us to use their labs’ qPCR machines to test prototypes before we had our own. Two scientists from the University also helped evaluate our EvaGreen®- and probe-based mixes.

By 2009, thanks to these collaborations and efforts, we launched our first qPCR products that remain widely used today, like HOT FIREPol® EvaGreen® qPCR Mix Plus and HOT FIREPol® Probe qPCR Mix Plus.

Inventing blend mixes

Once the qPCR mixes were ready, we started developing our blend mixes — products that combine the strengths of endpoint and real-time PCR mixes. HOT FIREPol® Blend Master Mix and HOT FIREPol® Blend Master Mix Ready to Load contain two carefully optimized enzymes: HOT FIREPol® DNA polymerase and a proofreading polymerase. Blending these enzymes together gives the master mix both the 5’→ 3’ exonuclease activity as well as the 3’→ 5’ proofreading activity, resulting in up to fivefold higher fidelity compared to regular Taq polymerase.

These mixes initially started off as special products made on demand. But because they performed so well, we decided to add them to our list of catalog products. Thanks to their unique properties, they are widely used in cloning procedures and in amplifying longer fragments (up to 5 kb).

Today, HOT FIREPol® Blend Master Mix is popular not only in research labs, but also in plant biology, veterinary diagnostics, and even mobile laboratories — where its reliability under demanding conditions makes it an invaluable tool.

Getting ISO certified

Alongside developing new products, we were also working on a major milestone — achieving ISO certification. This effort was led by Kadri Artma, our current Chairwoman of the Council, whose dedication guided us through years of preparation and improvement.

In 2008, we were awarded our first ISO 9001 certificate, marking our commitment to consistent quality and international standards—a foundation that continues to support our growth today.

Diving into HRM method

In 2009, we began developing our HRM (High Resolution Melt) technology — a faster and more budget-friendly alternative to sequencing and other genotyping methods. HRM enables post-PCR analysis to detect SNPs, genetic mutations, and DNA sequence variations with precision and efficiency.

From 2010, we had dived into a whole new area of enzyme development. But that is a story for next time. Stay tuned!