Protein Production on Michael’s Domain

The DTE protein asporin and gut regeneration

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Aging and regeneration are two of the most fascinating areas of life science. The somewhat obscure protein (or rather proteoglycan) Asporin, previously known, e.g., to regulate TGF-beta activity in cartilage, has now been shown to play a key role in the regeneration of the intestine. An impressive demonstration of scientific grit, Sharif & Pekka! This paper has been in the making for many years, and there were multiple technical challenges to overcome. Sawan K. Jha started this collaboration in 2017 by creating several cell lines before he succeeded with the recombinant production of Asporin. There is no generally accepted definition for the term “difficult to express (DTE) protein”, but Asporin fits the description well. It has miserable yields, and its activity is easily lost during purification. Sawan also produced and purified the first batches, and after Sawan had moved on to Red-Horse Lab at Stanford University , Sharif (upstream) and I (downstream) shared the production and purification work. Here is the direct link to the publication, which should work until April 26, even if you do not have a subscription. After that, use https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2025.02.009 . If you don’t have a subscription, I will happily send you the PDF by email…

Mia Sivén, the world's first professor of sustainable pharmacy

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When we were asking our foreign students what made them join the University of Helsinki, several of them mentioned sustainability aspects. Many of the research groups at the Faculty of Pharmacy study topics that are highly relevant to a sustainable future. For example, tackling the increasing threat of antibiotic resistance is a high priority for our faculty. And my group works on the planet’s most environmentally friendly protein production system. There is no part of a drug’s life cycle that could not be approached from a sustainability angle. Therefore, it was high time that this over-arching theme was finally acknowledged by establishing a dedicated professor position. To our knowledge, next month Mia Sivén will start her job as the world’s first professor of sustainable pharmacy . You are probably not surprised that I am very happy about this appointment.

"Bioactive VEGF-C from E. coli cytoplasm" preprint online

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The preprint of our manuscript is online. We show how to produce bioactive mature VEGF-C in the cytoplasm of E. coli bacteria without the need for a folding step. It took us quite a while to get there, and we tried many things that did not work before we found a way how to do it. We describe also the methods that failed. It looks as if VEGF-C has simply too many cysteine residues that all have to pair up in the correct configuration. In the same manuscript, we also report a workable refolding method. Please have a look and give us some feedback: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1776636/v1 .

RPU Seminar 2016

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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Recombinant proteins

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A dynamically updated list of proteins used to be here, but I shut down the communication to our lab’s database server due to security concerns.