Creative Biostructure services

Proteins are the building blocks of all living organisms and play crucial roles in biological processes. To investigate how a particular protein modulates biological processes, many aspects of the protein such as structure, modification, localization, interaction, and function need to be studied. A considerable number of proteins, especially membrane proteins, are screened in drug discovery as biological targets or as potential drugs themselves. Most of these proteins are produced using cell-based or cell-free expression systems, which typically include the transcription of recombinant DNA into mRNA that is further translated into the protein under study.

The formation of virus-like particles (VLPs) is a result of self-assembly of one or several types of viral structural proteins, such as Envelope or Capsid. The component proteins can originate from different viruses or be recombinantly expressed. Various systems have been used in the successful construction of VLPs from different sources including bacterial, yeast, insect cells, plant and mammalian hosts. VLPs are non-infectious because they contain no viral genetic material. VLPs include a number of biological objects, such as uncharacterized structures with viral morphology, empty structures of viral origin, self-assembled gene products, etc. VLPs also provide a highly efficient vaccine platform and a wide variety of VLPs have entered pre-clinical and clinical development.