Courses

Protein factories

During autumn 2024, LP3 hosts this practical course for postgraduate participants. Application for the course will open during spring 2024.

In this course, you will get hands-on experience with protein production and purification using bacterial and insect cell-based expression systems (baculovirus expression vector system (BEVS)).

The course presents methods to express genes, which have products that are known, unknown, or not well characterised, and to analyse the gene products. We discuss the theories behind the methods and perform experiments.

During the course, you learn about these methods:

• Optimization of recombinant gene expression in Escherichia coli and in the BEVS
• Affinity purification of tagged proteins
• To using proteases to for the removal of protein fusion tags
• Generation and analysis of gene fusions
• Molecular cloning
• Metabolic engineering
• Seleno-methionine incorporation for MAD phasing
• 2H-, 13C-, 15N-labeling for NMR studies
• Production of perdeuterated proteins for neutron-scattering experiments.

You will also learn strategies for improving the production of "difficult" proteins. The lectures will cover the current status of cell-based protein production systems and the theoretical aspects of the methodology.