Parallel production and verification of protein products using a novel high-throughput screening method

Protein production and analysis in a parallel fashion is today applied in laboratories worldwide and there is a great need to improve the techniques and systems used for this purpose. In order to save time and money, a fast and reliable screening method for analysis of protein production and also verification of the protein product is desired. Here, a micro-scale protocol for the parallel production and screening of 96 proteins in plate format is described. Protein capture was achieved using immobilized metal affinity chromatography and the product was verified using matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight MS. In order to obtain sufficiently high cell densities and product yield in the small-volume cultivations, the EnBase® cultivation technology was applied, which enables cultivation in as small volumes as 150 μL. Here, the efficiency of the method is demonstrated by producing 96 human, recombinant proteins, both in micro-scale and using a standard full-scale protocol and comparing the results in regard to both protein identity and sample purity. The results obtained are highly comparable to those acquired through employing standard full-scale purification protocols, thus validating this method as a successful initial screening step before protein production at a larger scale.

High-throughput protein production--lessons from scaling up from 10 to 288 recombinant proteins per week

The demand for high-throughput recombinant protein production has markedly increased with the increased activity in the field of proteomics. Within the Human Protein Atlas project recombinantly produced human protein fragments are used for antibody production. Here we describe how the protein expression and purification protocol has been optimized in the project to allow for handling of nearly 300 different proteins per week. The number of manual handling steps has been significantly reduced (from 18 to 9) and the protein purification has been completely automated.