Intein as a Novel Strategy for Protein Purification

Inteins are parts of proteins that cut themselves out of the whole protein entirely on their own. An important development in the area of recombinant protein purification has been the incorporation of self-cleaving protein elements into a variety of fusion-based purification systems. Inteins appear most frequently in Archaea, but they are found in organisms belonging to all three domains of life and in viral and phage proteins. Most inteins consist of two domains: One is involved in autocatalytic splicing, and the other is an endonuclease that is important in the spread of inteins. This review focuses on the evolution and technical application of inteins and only briefly summarizes recent advances in the study of the catalytic activities and structures of inteins. We further investigated the recent expanded applications of the Express Protein Ligation (EPL) technology in the fields of proteomics and bioimaging. This work is expected to provide a rough outline for the evaluation of these methods for large-scale bioprocessing of a variety of products. [Elahe Seyed Hosseini, Mehdi Zeinoddini, Hamed Haddad Kashani. Intein as a Novel Strategy for Protein Purification. Life Sci J 2012;9(4):2187-2195] (ISSN: 1097-8135). http://www.lifesciencesite.com. 325