Brief description not available

Brief description not available

Brief description not available

Living bioreactors are powerful systems for producing a variety of valuable compounds. The versatility of such bioreactors is one of the more useful aspects of the system. Large quantities of compounds or cellular components can be produced efficiently, with minimal cost. Alternately, these systems can be used to produce pathway components that are necessary in the production of secondary products. A common problem with such systems is that they are limited by non-uniform production of pathway components, or require an isolation process to ensure the components are in the appropriate quantity and sequence in the process. Inventors at Texas A&M and UC San Francisco have developed a novel technique to address these issues. The technology effectively results in a stoichiometric production of protein components that are produced in an array, ready for secondary production.

Direct and selective labeling of α-amines or α-carboxylates of the N-terminal amino acid in proteins is a powerful approach for profiling proteins in complex mixtures. Approximately 80% of mammalian proteins are N-terminally acetylated. Thus, N-terminal labeling provides greater signal over background than does C-terminal labeling. However, such labeling must still be extremely selective for α-amines over lysine ε-amines, which are approximately 25 times more abundant in an average protein.