UaebIProtein Production Fragment Based Drug Screening

The overall objective of this module is to familiarize and teach the students the techniques required to go from a gene to a purified recombinant protein. The course will also introduce the students to fragment based drug design. The students will start from a template DNA that will be cloned into a bacterial expression vector, transformed into an expression strain and grown in a large scale to generate enough biomass to be able to purify the protein. The cells will then be harvested and the recombinant protein will be purified using affinity chromatography. When a pure protein has been obtained it will be used to screen a chemical compound library to find compounds that interact with the target protein. These ?fragment hits? can then be expanded and to generate high affinity drug like molecules (not covered in this course). The schedule of the ?lectures? (instructions) will be coordinately arranged based on each day?s experiments. Each student will need to submit a lab report at the end of the workshop. The students will be graded based on his/her lab report; the results of his/her daily experiments and his/her participation/performance during the workshop.