Large-scale monoclonal antibody purification by continuous chromatography, from process design to scale-up.

The development and optimization of a purification process of monoclonal antibodies based on two continuous chromatography steps for capture and intermediate purification are presented. The two chromatography steps were individually optimized using either batch chromatography or sequential multicolumn chromatography (SMCC). Proprietary simulation software was used to optimize SMCC and to evaluate the potential gains compared with batch chromatography.

The conserved Candida albicans CA3427 gene product defines a new family of proteins exhibiting the generic periplasmic binding protein structural fold.

Nosocomial diseases due to Candida albicans infections are in constant rise in hospitals, where they cause serious complications to already fragile intensive care patients. Antifungal drug resistance is fast becoming a serious issue due to the emergence of strains resistant to currently available antifungal agents. Thus the urgency to identify new potential protein targets, the function and structure of which may guide the development of new antifungal drugs.

Structural and mutational analyses of Deinococcus radiodurans UvrA2 provide insight into DNA binding and damage recognition by UvrAs.

UvrA proteins are key actors in DNA damage repair and play an essential role in prokaryotic nucleotide excision repair (NER), a pathway that is unique in its ability to remove a broad spectrum of DNA lesions. Understanding the DNA binding and damage recognition activities of the UvrA family is a critical component for establishing the molecular basis of this process. Here we report the structure of the class II UvrA2 from Deinococcus radiodurans in two crystal forms.

Structural characterization of CA1462, the Candida albicans thiamine pyrophosphokinase.

Background: In search of new antifungal targets of potential interest for pharmaceutical companies, we initiated a comparative genomics study to identify the most promising protein-coding genes in fungal genomes. One criterion was the protein sequence conservation between reference pathogenic genomes. A second criterion was that the corresponding gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae should be essential.

Structure and evolution of the Ivy protein family, unexpected lysozyme inhibitors in Gram-negative bacteria.

Part of an ancestral bactericidal system, vertebrate C-type lysozyme targets the peptidoglycan moiety of bacterial cell walls. We report the crystal structure of a protein inhibitor of C-type lysozyme, the Escherichia coli Ivy protein, alone and in complex with hen egg white lysozyme. Ivy exhibits a novel fold in which a protruding five-residue loop appears essential to its inhibitory effect.