Combinatorial Domain Hunting: solving problems in protein expression.

Modern drug discovery demands large amounts of high-quality protein and, therefore, begins by expressing target genes in heterologous systems such as bacteria or insect cells. However, some of the most attractive drug targets have proven challenging to clone and express. A technology called Combinatorial Domain Hunting has been developed to express regions or domains of proteins in a non-aggregated form. This technology has been applied to more than 50 targets and, in all cases, high-expressing protein domains have been produced. In many cases, the protein is also non-aggregated, making it ideal for developing assays for screening or determining its X-ray crystal structure. (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.