How To Prepare for the Unexpected: a Public Health Laboratory Response.

Public health laboratories (PHLs) continue to face internal and external challenges to their abilities to provide successful, timely responses to public health crises and emerging threats. These laboratories are mandated to maintain the health of their communities by identifying, diagnosing, and warning constituents of potential and real health emergencies. Due to the changing characteristics of public health threats and their cross-jurisdictional nature, laboratories are facing increased pressure to ensure that they respond in a consistent and coordinated manner.

Engineering of cysteine residues leads to improved production of a human dipeptidase enzyme in E. coli.

Low yields, poor folding efficiencies and improper disulfide bridge formation limit large-scale production of cysteine-rich proteins in Escherichia coli. Human renal dipeptidase (MDP), the only human beta-lactamase known to date, is a homodimeric enzyme, which contains six cysteine residues per monomer. It hydrolyses penem and carbapenem beta-lactam antibiotics and can cleave dipeptides containing amino acids in both D: - and L: -configurations.