Robert Petrovich, NIEH, to Speak at GTC’s Protein Expression Conf., Oct. 24-25, San Diego

San Diego, CA, September 10, 2013 --(PR.com)-- Robert Petrovich, Leader of the Protein Expression Core Facility of the Laboratory of Structural Biology at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences will give a presentation on “Expression and Purification of Proteins in a Budget Limited World” at GTC’s Protein Expression, Purification & Characterization Conference on October 24–25, 2013 in San Diego, CA.

For the past 10 years the budget of the Protein Expression Core Facility has been flat. During the past year Dr. Petrovich’s mission has been altered to include purification with the addition of limited resources. To cope with this, they have begun the implementation of the Phynexus platform for rapid evaluation of affinity chromatography steps as well as looking for methods for scale up which are relatively inexpensive. Dr. Petrovich’s group has investigated the use of live caterpillars as living bioreactors for baculovirus mediated protein expression as well as the use of anti-GFP “nanobodies” for pull-downs and protein purification of GFP tagged proteins.

Benefits of micro scale purification on method development include:

• Live insect bioreactors can cheaply produce large amounts of protein, if you can work out the purification.
• GFP tag and anti-GFP “nanobodies” are a viable alternative to HA or Flag tags for cellular expression localization and pull down experiments, but not large scale protein production.

Robert Petrovich, Ph. D., is the leader of the Protein Expression Core Facility at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health where he has been handling between 50 and 80 new expression projects a year for the last 10 years.

The Protein Expression, Purification & Characterization Conference will bring together experts from biotech, pharma, academia and the public sector to discuss the issues, challenges and opportunities in the field of protein expression and purification as it relates to therapeutic development. Topics of discussions will include novel expression platforms and systems, protein optimization, new purification methods, protein analytical tools, process development, scale-up and manufacturability.

For more information, please visit www.gtcbio.com/proteinexpression