West-Life: A Virtual Research Environment for structural biology.

The West-Life project (https://about.west-life.eu/) is a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Commission to provide data processing and data management services for the international community of structural biologists, and in particular to support integrative experimental approaches within the field of structural biology.

Recording information on protein complexes in an information management system.

The Protein Information Management System (PiMS) is a laboratory information management system (LIMS) designed for use with the production of proteins in a research environment. The software is distributed under the CCP4 licence, and so is available free of charge to academic laboratories. Like most LIMS, the underlying PiMS data model originally had no support for protein-protein complexes.

Automation of large scale transient protein expression in mammalian cells.

Traditional mammalian expression systems rely on the time-consuming generation of stable cell lines; this is difficult to accommodate within a modern structural biology pipeline. Transient transfections are a fast, cost-effective solution, but require skilled cell culture scientists, making man-power a limiting factor in a setting where numerous samples are processed in parallel. Here we report a strategy employing a customised CompacT SelecT cell culture robot allowing the large-scale expression of multiple protein constructs in a transient format.

Structural genomics of the Epstein-Barr virus.

Epstein-Barr virus is a herpesvirus that causes infectious mononucleosis, carcinomas and immunoproliferative disease. Its genome encodes 86 proteins, which provided targets for a structural genomics project. After updating the annotation of the genome, 23 open reading frames were chosen for expression in Escherichia coli, initially selecting for those with known enzyme activity and then supplementing this set based on a series of predicted properties, in particular secondary structure.