Protein Production and Characterisation (PPC) belongs to the recently established “Sydney Analytical” core facility at The University of Sydney, and is one of the platforms created under the University’s Drug Discovery Initiative (DDI). The PPC’s aim is to assist researchers, wherever they come from, with the expression, purification and characterisation of their proteins of interest. We work with three different expression hosts (bacterial, insect, and mammalian cells), and use highly specialised protein purification and analysis equipment.
Since our opening almost a year ago, we have been involved in several projects helping our users to extend the scope of their research with protein production solutions. Examples of these include the expression and purification of:
- Cas9 protein, to give our user access to a more affordable and efficient method for CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing in living worms.
- dCas9 protein, to allow our user to perform modern sequence-targeted genomics and proteomics methods.
- Histone-modifying proteins, of central interest for one of our users. This user can now work with purified versions of these enzymes, and therefore gain a more detailed insight into their function.
- Large amounts of an enzyme involved in fungal metabolism, with the aim of designing drugs targeting it in our associated Fragment Based Drug Design (FBDD) platform. We are also producing sufficient quantities of this protein for crystallisation studies.
In this poster I will show the results of case examples like these and, in this way, how the PPC can benefit a broad range of researchers.