Abstract

Proteins are involved in virtually all processes within cells and, importantly, are the targets that drugs bind to. Production of genetically engineered (recombinant) proteins enables research into biological structure and function. There are several established systems for producing recombinant proteins including bacterial, yeast, insect and mammalian cells and also cell free systems. Over the past 17 years, through collaborative research as part of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), based at the University of Oxford, we developed methodologies and processes for screening and producing human proteins involved in disease for structural and functional studies. The SGC is a not-for-profit, public-private partnership that promotes research advancement through an open access policy, providing knowledge and tools freely available and in the absence of IP. In August 2020, we became part of the Centre for Medicines Discovery (CMD), within the Nuffield Department of Medicine, running a Small Research Facility (SRF) which provides Protein Production services for internal and external academics and industries. In this talk, I will discuss the methods developed in my group at Oxford for high-throughput protein expression screening that enabled the SGC groups globally to solve more than 2000 human protein structures including more than 20 novel integral membrane proteins (IMPs). This was achieved by combining our approaches of targeting protein families, expressing multiple constructs and applying optimised, standard parallel processes.