Bacillus anthracis protective antigen (PA) is a well known and relevant immunogenic protein that is the basis for both anthrax vaccines and diagnostic methods. Properly folded antigenic PA is necessary for these applications. In this study a high level of PA was obtained in recombinant Escherichia coli. The protein was initially accumulated in inclusion bodies, which facilitated its efficient p...

BACKGROUND Human glucose 6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD), active in both dimer and tetramer forms, is the key entry enzyme in the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP), providing NADPH for biosynthesis and various other purposes, including protection against oxidative stress in erythrocytes. Accordingly haemolytic disease is a major consequence of G6PD deficiency mutations in man, and many severe di...

Stopped-flow fluorescence and circular dichroism spectroscopy have been used in conjunction with quenched-flow hydrogen exchange labelling, monitored by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, to compare the refolding kinetics of hen egg-white lysozyme at 20 degrees C and 50 degrees C. At 50 degrees C there is clear evidence for distinct fast and slow refolding populations, as observed at 20...

Density is an easily adjusted variable in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Thus, pressure-jump (P-jump)-induced protein refolding, if it could be made fast enough, would be ideally suited for comparison with MD. Although pressure denaturation perturbs secondary structure less than temperature denaturation, protein refolding after a fast P-jump is not necessarily faster than that after a tem...

The disulphide-coupled refolding of recombinant prochymosin from Escherichia coli inclusion bodies was investigated. Prochymosin solubilized from inclusion bodies is endowed with free thiol groups and disulphide bonds. This partially reduced form undergoes renaturation more efficiently than the fully reduced form, suggesting that some native structural elements existing in inclusion bodies and ...

Escherichia coli is one of the most widely used hosts for the production of recombinant proteins but insoluble expression of heterologous proteins is a major bottleneck in production of recombinant proteins in E. coli. In vitro refolding of inclusion body into proteins with native conformations is a solution for this problem but there is a need for optimization of condition for each protein spe...

The rapid provision of purified native protein underpins both structural biology and the development of new biopharmaceuticals. The dominance of Escherichia coli as a cellular biofactory depends on technology for solubilizing and refolding proteins that are expressed as insoluble inclusion bodies. Such technology must be scale invariant, easily automated, generic for a broad range of similar pr...

The Anfinsen hypothesis, the demonstration of which led to the Nobel prize in Chemistry, posits that all information required to determine a proteins' three dimensional structure is contained within its amino acid sequence. This suggests that it should be possible, in theory, to fold any protein in vitro. In practice, however, protein production by refolding is challenging because suitable refo...

Amphioxus insulin-like peptide (AILP) belongs to the insulin superfamily and is proposed as the common ancestor of insulin and insulin-like growth factor 1. Herein, the studies on oxidative refolding and reductive unfolding of AILP are reported. During the refolding process, four major intermediates, P1, P2, P3, and P4, were captured, which were almost identical to those intermediates, U1, U2, ...

Creatine kinase (CK) is a dimeric enzyme important in ATP regeneration in cells where energy demands are high. The folding of CK under equilibrium and transient conditions has been studied in detail and is found to be complex. At equilibrium in 0.8 M GuHCl, 90% of CK molecules are in the form of a partially structured, monomeric intermediate. We exploit this property to measure kinetics of refo...