Protein Production

The PPF offers six core services:

• Cloning
• Solubility and expression screening
• Purification
• Full E. coli expression
• Full insect expression
• Full mammalian expression

All three full services include cloning, screening, large scale growth and purification.

Our services are tailored to your needs, so as long as your project requirement fits within our remit of protein production we can usually accommodate most requests.

The facility has two project types: user-led and facility-led.

User-led projects involve a member of your group using our facility, under full guidance, and performing the experimental work themselves. This provides an excellent opportunity for staff and students to learn new skills whilst being instructed by our expert staff. Facility-led projects are performed as a service where one of our staff members will perform all of the lab work for you.

With the latest Hamilton robotics we can perform hundreds, or even thousands, of PCR and cloning reactions with relative ease.

We can also screen up to 96 samples at a time for protein expression and solubility, testing for optimum conditions for your protein in little over an hour for the purification process.

Microbiology area

Hamilton Robot

G-Box

For large scale growth we have incubator capacity in excess of 36 litres for E. coli with our MaxQ8000 and MaxQ6000 incubators.

Large scale purification is performed on one of our AKTA chromatography systems, including an AKTA Pure with multiple inlet valve, column valve and sample pump that can be used for semi-automating our purification process.

We stock a range of affinity and ion exchange chromatography columns to meet the majority of requirements, as well as a wide range of preparative and analytical gel filtration columns.

Specialty columns can be purchased as required to match your requirements.

MaxQ8000 incubators

AKTA

Cell Disrupter

In addition to our E. coli incubators, we have a further three MaxQ8000 incubators that can hold up to 36 two litre flasks for insect cell growth.

We also have CO2 shaking incubators with up to eight litres capacity for suspension mammalian cell growth.

With our dedicated Class II cell culture laboratory, insect and mammalian expression are a good option for proteins difficult to express in E. coli.

EVOS Microscope

Minitron incubators

Safe2020 cell culture hoods