Mempro™ Plant-Based Lipocalin Production
Based on the comprehensive protein engineering platform established through many years of experience, scientists from Creative Biostructure provides custom Mempro™ lipocalin production services based on plant system.
The lipocalins are a family of extracellular proteins of around 200 residues that can bind and transport small and hydrophobic molecules, for instance, steroids, bilins, retinoids, and lipids. The key feature of lipocalin is that binds to specific cell-surface receptor to form macromolecular complexes. Members of the lipocalin family possess a common tertiary structure architecture, which is an eight stranded antiparallel β-barrel with a repeated topology containing an internal ligand binding site. Lipocalin proteins are invovled in various biological functions, including cancer cell interactions, immune response, retinoid binding, prostaglandin synthesis, and pheromone transport. Nowadays, lipocalin proteins has been indentified in eukaryotic organisms, mostly in vertebrates.
Figure 1. Two lipocalin models. (Openi)
Creative Biostructure has set up patent Mempro™ plant-based protein production platform, which is an animal-free, low endotoxin and low protease activity protein expression system. Recombinant membrane proteins expressed by this system are free of animal components, serum, endotoxins and antibiotics as well as human or animal infectious agents or other endogenous mammalian contamination.
Notably, Creative Biostructure can employ different types of host plants to produce recombinant membrane proteins, such as Nicotiana benthamiana (tobacco), Medicago rativa (alfalfa), Arabidopsis thaliana (A. thaliana), potato, maize, barley and lettuce. Due to plant-derived expression system has lots of significant advantages, including cost-effective, high yield, easy storage and distribution, friendly environment, and free of infectious or toxic contaminants, this innovative system can be widely utilized in recent years.
With the Mempro™ plant-based membrane protein production platform, Creative Biostructure is capable of expressing, isolating, purifying and crystallizing lipocalins to facilitate the study of their biological functions. Misfolding, aggregation, inactivity, poor stability and solubility, etc. are the common difficulties encountered in cell-based expression system. Strikingly, these difficulties can be bypassed in the renewed plant-based expression system. And recombinant membrane proteins from plant system are particularly crucial for customers concerned with experimental variables caused by trace animal components or mammalian pathogens.
Creative Biostructure can also provide Mempro™ plant-based virus-like particles (VLPs) production services. Please feel free to contact us for a detailed quote.
References:
A. Schiefner and A. Skerra (2015). The menagerie of human lipocalins: A natural protein scaffold for molecular recognition of physiological compounds.Acc. Chem., 48(4): 976–985.
A. Wiktorek-Smagur, et al. (2012). Green way of biomedicine – how to force plants to produce new important proteins. Transgenic Plants-Advances and Limitations, Chapter 3. doi: 10.5772/1409.
D. R. Flower (1996). The lipocalin protein family: structure and function. Biochem. J., 318(Pt 1): 1-14.