Protein production innovation gets R&D award
that simplifies the production of proteins in the widely used T7
gene expression system.
The T7 expression system, developed and patented at Brookhaven Lab in the 1980s and 1990s, is used worldwide by academia and industry to produce specific proteins within bacterial cells.
The new method, designed by William Studier, simplifies the production of many proteins in parallel and will be useful for biomedical research or for industrial production of proteins to use as enzymes, diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics and targets for developing pharmaceuticals.
Expression systems such as the T7 system allow biologists and medical scientists to obtain useful amounts of individual proteins for analyzing their structures and functions.
Commercially available through Merck KGaA subsidiary EMD Biosciences, under the Novagen brand, the Overnight Express Autoinduction System relies on mechanisms by which bacteria sense the presence of nutrients in their surroundings and select which ones to use.
An appropriate mixture of nutrients allows the bacteria to grow vigorously and then, at the appropriate stage of growth, switch automatically to producing the target protein without any intervention by the experimenter.
"The new autoinduction system is very convenient," Studier said. "Instead of spending much of the day monitoring the growth of many different cultures to get optimum conditions for producing proteins, we simply inoculate cultures late in the day, let autoinduction do the work for us, and collect our proteins the next morning. An added bonus is that we usually get much more protein."
Studier started his research on T7 - a common bacteria-eating virus - when he first joined Brookhaven Lab in 1964.
"The T7 expression system came out of basic research and the autoinduction system is also an application of basic knowledge. As so often happens, basic research led to useful applications in unexpected ways."
The scientist, based at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, has won a 2004 R&D 100 award for the method, which will be presented in Chicago on 14 October.
