SBB09Ntbk-John Wang
Protein A
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Concurrent notes about my project-
My project is to find a engineered protein A. Protein A is an antigen which has been known to bind to IgG. The two papers I choose for designing my part are:
Actual Sequence
How they got to the sequence
The key idea in the papers was that protein A is a protein found in Staphylococcus aureus. The protein is good at taking out IgG antibodies by binding to them. There's two sites on IgG that it can bind to. The fab and the fc portions. The fab is of the the 2 heads of the y antibody and the fc is that tale. Since we're only interesting in the tail, an effort was made to find the smallest protein domain possible that still binds to the fc portion of IgG. What I initially didn't understand was why they were expressing conformations of protein A in phages. As it turns out, they were using phages to select for smaller proteins which still bind. Thus they came up with the Z38. However, Z38 turned out to be unstable which lead to the development of Z34c which actually bind much tighter than Z38 to fc, but loses the ability to bind to fab.
2-16-2009
So I did a bit of cleaning on my wiki page and created: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Protein_A_FLAG_Tag_M10018_M10019
I suppose I am going to finish my zymo clean-up. Not sure if I'll be able to start digestion unless I have an hour and 30 left. If I can just finish digestion, that would make my life a lot easier next time.
Also I'm adding a link to the gateway reaction for my second part just for my own convenience: Flag
2-6-2009
Today I made my openwetware notebook page.
