Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) has been extensively used in biopesticidal formulations due to its safe environmental and human health records. The widespread use of Bt is often challenged by production as well as formulation costs which are in direct contact with downstream processing, i.e. the separation/purification step. Downstream separation/purification efficacy governs the marketabi...

Natural products provide excellent potential leads for drug development because of their chemical diversity and biological functionality. However, the productivity of discovery of new, pharmacologically active natural products has traditionally been low due to inherent difficulties and costs associated with extract dereplication, i.e., isolation, purification and structure elucidation of indivi...

Plasmid purification is a basic tool of molecular biologists. Although the development of plasmid isolation kits utilizing silica spin columns reduced the time and labor spent on plasmid purification, achieving large plasmid DNA yields still requires significant time and effort. Here we introduce the Miraprep, a rapid protocol that allows isolation of plasmid DNA using commercial Miniprep kits,...

His-tag affinity purification is one of the most commonly used methods to purify recombinant proteins expressed in E. coli. One drawback of using the His-tag is the co-purification of contaminating histidine-rich E. coli proteins. We engineered a new E. coli expression strain, LOBSTR (low background strain), which eliminates the most abundant contaminants. LOBSTR is derived from the E. coli BL2...

Natural products provide excellent potential leads for drug development because of their chemical diversity and biological functionality. However, the productivity of discovery of new, pharmacologically active natural products has traditionally been low due to inherent difficulties and costs associated with extract dereplication, i.e., isolation, purification and structure elucidation of indivi...

Poly(ethylene glycol)-conjugated (or PEGylated) proteins are an increasingly important class of therapeutic proteins that offer improved in vivo circulation half lives over their corresponding native forms. Their production involves covalent attachment of one or more poly(ethylene glycol) molecules to a native protein, followed by purification. Because of the extremely high costs involved in pr...

Downstream processing is still a major bottleneck in recombinant protein production representing most of its costs. Hence, there is a continuing demand of novel and cost-effective purification processes aiming at the recovery of pure and active target protein. In this work, a novel purification methodology is presented, using the Fh8 solubility enhancer tag as fusion handle. The binding propert...

In a previous study, we demonstrated a non-chromatographic affinity-based precipitation method, using trivalent haptens, for the purification of mAbs. In this study, we significantly improved this process by using a simplified bivalent peptidic hapten (BPH) design, which enables facile and rapid purification of mAbs while overcoming the limitations of the previous trivalent design. The improved...

Affinity tags are highly efficient tools for protein purification. They allow the purification of virtually any protein without any prior knowledge of its biochemical properties. The use of affinity tags has therefore become widespread in several areas of research e.g., high throughput expression studies aimed at finding a biological function to large numbers of yet uncharacterized proteins. In...