Post-production protein stability: trouble beyond the cell factory

Post-production protein stability: trouble beyond the cell factory

Being protein function a conformation-dependent issue, avoiding aggregation during production is a major challenge in biotechnological processes, what is often successfully addressed by convenient upstream, midstream or downstream approaches. Even when obtained in soluble forms, proteins tend to aggregate, especially if stored and manipulated at high concentrations, as is the case of protein dr...

Beyond the impact factory

For a week each summer, the doors of the Royal Society in London are flung open and the public are allowed to trample its august corridors and view exhibits covering every field of scientific endeavour, from nematodes to moon-buggies. About five thousand turn up, ranging from inner-city sixthformers to retired tax inspectors, and in the evening blacktie soirees the Fellows, and the Great and th...

Green Factory: Recombinant Protein Production in Chloroplasts

erated by introducing foreign genes into the nuclear genome. Here we focus on plastid transformation as an alternative. Plastids have their own rudimentary genome, the plastome, which encodes around 120 genes [1]. Plastids in green tissues are “chloroplasts”, whose primary function is photosynthesis. In contrast to the nuclear genome with typically two copies of each gene per cell, the plastome...

Melanoma Cell Factory for Glycolipid Production

Developing a yeast cell factory for the production of terpenoids

Technological developments over the past century have made microbes the work-horses of large scale industrial production processes. Current efforts focus on the metabolic engineering of microbial strains to produce high levels of desirable end-products. The arsenal of the contemporary metabolic engineer contains tools that allow either targeted rational interventions or global screens that comb...