Team:UBrawijaya
Clean Harvest of Overexpressed Protein System
Video
Industrial enzymes are enzymes that are used commercially in a variety of industries including in the household industry, food & beverage, pharmaceuticals, and many more. Enzymes are more favored to be used in industries due to their specificity, sustainability, and efficiency compared to the conventional processes.
Efforts have been made by Indonesian enzyme industries to meet the national demand for enzymes. Yet the development of enzyme industries is still faced with several technical difficulties, including in the downstream process for retrieving the enzymes. This is causing Indonesia to have to import 90% of its enzyme demand.
Current approaches that have been used by domestic enzyme industries lack the variability of options for the enzyme produced, this is due to the use of wild-type strains in which they can only produce certain types of enzymes.
The methods that are currently used to get concentrated, purified yield of enzymes for industries are also costly and require multiple steps, for instance the ultrafiltration and microfiltration. These drawbacks hinder the growth of national enzyme production to meet the national demands, let alone to compete globally.
Therefore, we are introducing our project...
The Clean Harvest of Overexpressed Protein System
The system works by anchoring an enzyme of interest (EoI) onto the extracellular terminals of an outer membrane protein (OMP). As the cells grow, they will naturally shed their outer membrane as vesicles (OMV) containing OMP-EoI fusion.
Due to OMVs being smaller than cells yet larger than free proteins, they can be separated from the bulk of protein impurities, simplifying the downstream processing. Once separated, the EoI may be released from the OMP by cleaving off a specific linker between the fusion with specific proteases. The development of overexpression systems that simplify downstream purification is expected to significantly reduce the enzyme production costs.
We would like to thank our sponsors
