What is "applera"

Applera Corporation of Norwalk, Connecticut, at #874 on the 2007 Fortune 1000 list, was one of the largest international biotechnology companies based in the United States. It was the successor company to what was the Life Sciences Division of Perkin-Elmer Corporation. Applera was not publicly traded, but instead it consisted of two major groups which are publicly traded tracking stocks in the proteomics industrial sector. These two groups were the S&P 500 listed Applera Corp- Applied Biosystems Group of Foster City, California, and Applera Corp- Celera Genomics Group of Rockville, Maryland. In 2006, the company spun off the Celera Genomics group and changed its name from Applera to Applied Biosystems.

As the former Perkin-Elmer, Applera had a history dating back to 1931. But more precisely, its history dates from 1999, when Perkin-Elmer effectively split in half, and sold off its more traditional half of the business to EG&G Inc. As part of the deal, it also sold the Perkin-Elmer name, because that most properly associated with that traditional line of products, and EG&G then became the new PerkinElmer. At that point the remaining Connecticut Life Sciences company issued its two tracking stocks, and also changed its own name to PE Corporation. The Applied Biosystems group had earlier already been renamed PE Biosystems, and it retained that name in the first incarnation of its tracking stock. In 2000, the Applied Biosystems name was restored to the group, with the new stock ticker symbol ABI, and PE Corporation became Applera, a combination of its two components' names, Applera.