Publications by authors named "Desmond M Schofield"

We sought to engineer mammalian cells to secrete nuclease activity as a step toward removing the need to purchase commercial nucleases as process additions in bioprocessing of AAV5 and AAV9 as gene therapy vectors. Engineering HeLa cells with a serratial nuclease transgene did not bring about nuclease activity in surrounding media whereas engineering serum-free, suspension-adapted HEK293F cells with a staphylococcal nuclease transgene did result in detectable nuclease activity in surrounding media of the resultant stable transfectant cell line, "NuPro-1S." When cultivated in serum-free media, NuPro-1S cells yielded 3.

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Objectives: To reduce unwanted Fab' leakage from an autonucleolytic Escherichia coli strain, which co-expresses OmpA-signalled Staphylococcal nuclease and Fab' fragment in the periplasm, by substituting in Serratial nuclease and the DsbA periplasm translocation signal as alternatives.

Results: We attempted to genetically fuse a nuclease from Serratia marcescens to the OmpA signal peptide but plasmid construction failed, possibly due to toxicity of the resultant nuclease. Combining Serratial nuclease to the DsbA signal peptide was successful.

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Fab' fragments have become an established class of biotherapeutic over the last two decades. Likewise, developments in synthetic biology are providing ever more powerful techniques for designing bacterial genes, gene networks and entire genomes that can be used to improve industrial performance of cells used for production of biotherapeutics. We have previously observed significant leakage of an exogenous therapeutic Fab' fragment into the growth medium during high cell density cultivation of an Escherichia coli production strain.

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We measured the impact of the presence of total () cellular material on the performance of the Linear Regression of Efficiency (LRE) method of absolute quantitative PCR (LRE qPCR), which features the putatively universal CAL1 calibration reaction, which we propose as a synthetic biology standard. We firstly used a qPCR reaction in which a sequence present in the lone genomic BirA locus is amplified. Amplification efficiency for this reaction, a key metric for many quantitative qPCR methods, was inhibited by cellular material from bioreactor cultivation to a greater extent than material from shake flask cultivation.

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