Latest App Notes & Case Studies

Technological advances in the last couple of years have enabled 3D scaffolds to be engineered that offer a real proxy for the in vivo environment which can be easily and routinely used in a cell culture laboratory.

Alvetex Scaffold enables cells to develop natural, in vivo-like intercellular interactions, providing an ideal environment for real three-dimensional growth and nutrient exchange that is comparable to intra-capillary exchange in living tissues.

High purity protein is a common requirement for biochemical and structural studies. A common approach is to recombinantly express an affinity-tagged version of the protein of interest. This is, however, not always a viable option. This application note discusses protein purification workflow development for untagged proteins and introduce a new indicator of method performance, the purity quotient difference.

Characterising the state of aggregation in proteins is of paramount importance when trying to understand biopharmaceutical product stability and efficacy. Product quality, both in terms of biological activity and immunogenicity can be highly influenced by the state of protein aggregation.

A new laser-based nanoparticle tracking analysis system is now available which allows nanoscale particles such as viruses and virus aggregates to be directly and individually visualised in liquids in real-time, from which high-resolution particle size distribution profiles can be obtained.

Fetal calf serum containing bovine IgG is commonly used in mammalian cell culture media for the production of recombinant pharmaceuticals. During the purification process of a recombinant pharmaceutical, bovine IgG may be copurified with the product, and may represent a biological hazard for clinical use. Therefore, it may be necessary to assay for contaminant bovine IgG in a final product originating from mammalian cells.

Reporter-gene assays are used to study eukaryotic gene expression. Dual genetic reporters are commonly used in transient transfections of cultured cells to minimize experimental variability. Recently, Promega introduced a Dual-Glo Lucoferase assay system which replaced the outdated ‘flash’ assays used previously. Ensuring both genetic reporters have different substrate requirements enables them to be detected using a single reaction mixture.

The proteasome is a massive protein complex which can recognize and bind targeted proteins, and inject them into the central core where the proteins are successively degraded into short peptides. Whereas protein synthesis is well-understood after decades of study, major advances in our knowledge of protein degradation have occurred only in the last two decades.

LanthaScreen technology uses time-resolved fluorescence resonance energy transfer (TR-FRET) to study multiple target classes including protein kinases, nuclear hormone receptors, as well as proteases and ubiquitinated proteins.

Advances in blood banking, industrial biotechnology, bio-production and pharmaceutical laboratories have driven the need to process multiple sample batches.