New strategies for protein purification are always welcome additions to the protein researcher’s toolbox, especially when they offer simplified procedures. Wood and colleagues present a new chromatography-free and protease-free method for the purification of recombinant proteins bearing a unique fusion tag. This fusion tag consists of an elastin-like polypeptide, which reversibly precipitates a...

The development of self-cleaving fusion-tag technology has greatly simplified the purification of recombinant proteins at laboratory scale. The self-cleaving capability of these tags has recently been combined with additional purification tags to generate novel and convenient protein purification methods at a variety of scales. In this review, we describe some of these methods, and provide a ru...

BACKGROUND Amphiphilic peptides are important building blocks to generate nanostructured biomaterials for drug delivery and tissue engineering applications. We have shown that the self-assembling peptide SA2 (Ac-AAVVLLLWEE) can be recombinantly produced in E. coli when fused to the small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) protein. Although this system yielded peptides of high purity with no residua...

The study of functional RNAs of various sizes and structures requires efficient methods for their synthesis and purification. Here, 23 group I intron variants ranging in length from 246 to 341 nucleotides -- some containing exons -- were subjected to a native purification technique previously applied only to shorter RNAs (<160 nucleotides). For the RNAs containing both exons, we adjusted the or...

BACKGROUND PhaR which is a repressor protein for microbial polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) biosynthesis, is able to attach to bacterial PHA granules in vivo, was developed as an affinity tag for in vitro protein purification. Fusion of PhaR-tagged self-cleavable Ssp DnaB intein to the N-terminus of a target protein allowed protein purification with a pH and temperature shift. During the process, th...