Development of an Efficient and Affordable Protein Purification System to Study Protein Functions and Structures

This technology includes a semi-automatic and affordable protein purification system that produces purified proteins with yields and purities comparable to an automatic protein purification system for less than 10% of its cost, which can be used for studying protein structure and function, as well as antibody purifications and drug screenings. Additionally, the new system is flexible and customizable for use with both custom-made and commercial pre-made resin columns with either gravity flow or low-pressure configurations. Using a prototype, we have successfully performed one-step purification of different twin-strep tagged protein complexes overexpressed in mammalian cells and obtained proteins with more than 90% purity. This easy-to-use and user-friendly system can facilitate the affinity purification of any protein in both large and small scales. Therefore, this new system shares the advantages of both automatic and manual systems at a fraction of the cost, and therefore could be a better alternative for the protein purification systems currently available.