Bacterial expression strategies for human angiogenesis proteins.

We outline an expression strategy using Escherichia coli to obtain soluble components of a selected group of human proteins implicated in angiogenesis. These targets represent a heterogeneous group of proteins which for expression purposes were separated into cytoplasmic and helical membrane protein categories. Target selection was refined using a bioinformatic approach to generate a list of 50 experimental targets. A group consisting of forty-four cytoplasmic and signal-containing protein targets were amplified and cloned into multiple expression vectors. For this target category, we obtained 48% soluble expression products. In addition, we used a domain expression approach for six high molecular weight proteins predicted to contain membrane spanning helices to obtain soluble domain products. These results validate the utility of a bioinformatically driven high throughput approach to increase the number of soluble proteins or protein domains which can be used for multiple downstream applications.