Creative BioMart provides a complete set of services to enable protein engineering for a variety of applications by combining multiple technologies. Thousands of researchers benefit from these services in improving or generating proteins with new and desired functions.
What is protein engineering?
The primary objective of protein engineering is to identify specific changes in the amino acid sequence and to alter such sequence for desired functional properties. In general, two approaches have emerged in protein engineering: i) computational simulation based on modern computer techniques, known as rational design and, ii) experimental/molecular methods based on natures theme of evolution, known as directed evolution. At Creative BioMart, we developed both computational and experimental tools and to provide a reliable path of protein engineering from a starting point of gene information to final optimized proteins.
Figure 1. A Scheme depicting the divergent protein engineering strategies and their applications.
(Recent Patents on Biotechnology 2016)
Highlighted Features
Protein engineering has been applied to design and rewire proteins in various industries, such as chemical processing, household, food processing, and biopharmaceuticals. Based on the availability of studies on sequence-structure relationship, researchers apply either rational design or directed evolution, or a combination of both, to obtain proteins with desired properties. Creative BioMart has set up a protein engineering platform with unique features:
Advanced bioinformatic tools and computational approaches for rational design
Various strategies of library construction for directed evolution
Developed in vivo and in vitro protein display systems.
High-throughput screening
Characterization of screened/selected variants
Quantitative sequence-structure relationship
Rational design is based on comprehensive structural and functional information of the target protein. Computational methods have been developed for rational design based on known protein sequences and structures, namely sequence-based protein design and structure-based protein design. In some cases, proteins are designed from scratch, known as de novo protein design. Creative BioMart established several sequence-based engineering approaches, including multiple sequence alignments (MSA) and co-evolutionary analysis. We also provide homology modeling, fragment based prediction, protein threading and ab initio computation as structure-based strategies. Furthermore, a more extensive series of experiments are offered for de novo designs.
Directed evolution is a protein engineering method that mimics natural evolution. It is an iterative process including four general steps: i) diversification to generate gene library of the target protein; ii) expression of protein library; iii) screen the library under a specific condition for desired functions; and iv) amplify the selected “winner” (a member in the library). First, Creative BioMart provides various options to construct a gene library based on customer’s need. Next, Creative BioMart offers different protein display platforms for rapid protein expression, such as E. coli display, yeast display, phage display and cell-free display. With validated high-throughput strategies, we could further screen, optimize and eventually identify the final product with desired properties.
The protein engineering field is expanding rapidly for the last two decades in both the industrial and health care sectors. With years of experience and advanced technologies, Creative BioMart has been an expert known to the research community.
Figure 1. A Scheme depicting the divergent protein engineering strategies and their applications.
