Recently, Professor Yin Dachuan's research group has made new progress in the study of protein self-assembly. The relevant research results were published in "Applied microbiology and biotechnology" with an article titled "Searching for conditions of protein self-assembly by protein crystallization screening method".
The self-assembly of biomacromolecules is a very important process. It is potentially useful in the fields of life science and materials science. To carry out the study on the self-assembly of proteins, it is necessary to find out the suitable self-assembly conditions, which has always been a challenging task in practice. Inspired by the screening technique in the field of protein crystallization, we proposed to use the same screening technique for seeking the suitable protein self-assembly conditions. Based on this consideration, we selected 5 proteins (b-lactoglobulin, hemoglobin, pepsin, lysozyme, a-chymotrypsinogen (II) A) together with 5 screening kits (IndexTM, BML, Morpheus, JCSG, PEG/Ion ScreenTM) to investigate the performance of these crystallization screening technique in order to discover new optimized conditions of protein self-assembly. The screens were all kept at 293 K for certain days, and were analyzed using optical microscope, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscope, atomic force microscope, fluorescence microscope and atomic absorption spectroscopy. The results demonstrated that the method of protein crystallization screening can be successfully applied in the screening of self-assembly conditions. This method is fast, high throughput, and easily implemented in automated system, meanwhile with a low protein consumption feature. These results suggested that such strategy can be used for finding new conditions or forms in protein self-assembly research.
Dr. Tuo-di Zhang and Dr. Liang-liang Chen from Northwestern Polytechnical University (the first unit) are the co-first authors of the paper, Professor Dachuan Yin and Associate Professor Xudong Deng are the co-corresponding authors.
