Prokazyme is a spin-off from Prokaria (now part of Matis) that sells novel thermostable enzymes for research, diagnostic and industrial testing purposes on the internet. Our goal is to utilize the extensive know-how and expertice built up in Iceland for the last two decades on extremophile genomics and enzyme discovery. This includes vast extising gene databases made by Prokaria and still being maintained and expanded by Matis and Prokazyme. This knowledge base is highly valuable and internationally competitive.

A unique and world-leading position in thermophilic viral enzymes was build up within Prokaria in 1998-2006 with several major discoveries made. The viral biosphere is now getting an increased interest as the last big frontier of life. Matis-Prokaria is currently operating a GS-FLX 454 sequencing machine from Roche and this gives Prokazyme a unique opportunity to mine the under-utilized, thermophilic viral metagenome in Icelandic hot springs. Prokazyme already holds a large bank of sequence information including many bacteriophage genomes and extensive collection of unique DNA polymerases and other novel molecular enzymes. Our previous work on thermophilic viruses had mainly two bottlenecks: 1. The difficulty of isolating and cultivating pure viral strains and isolation of enough good DNA from them and 2. The difficulty in viral gene recognition as very few viral genes were known and tend to be so different from known bacterial genes that it was very difficult to identify them. With the HT GS-FLX sequencer we will be able to expand our gene banks by order of magnitude by direct sequencing whole genomes of uncultivated microbes. 

Our product portfolio will expand  by adding novel thermostable enzymes that have been discovered and developed by Matis-Prokaria.  Increased sales of our exisiting and new products are planned through our webstore. Also we plan to continue our discovery and development of new ThermoPhage products by doing large-scale sequencing of thermophilic viral metagenomes with the use of the new powerful GFX 454 DNA sequencer at Matis-Prokaria.  

Prokazyme´s current business assets include original products already in distribution, IP, internet sales reputation as well as license and distribution agreements with highly respected partners in the molecular reagents business. Several of our unique enzymes are protected by trademarks and patent applications, including several issued US and European patents.  The reputation of our products in the scientific literature is steadily growing, in particular novel thermostable kinase and ligases.  Our high novelty product Thermophage® ssDNA ligase which now has been acquired by Epicentre is the only ligase on the market that is up to 100% efficient in ligating ssDNA fragments and in particular in circularizing ssDNA with very high efficiency.