How do you test protein sequences that are the product of de novo computational design - antibodies, epitopes, peptide/protein drugs, targets, or enzymes? Computational design can generate hundreds to thousands of proteins to test, but cellular library-based approaches may be incompatible. As a result, you have to either test a handful of designs, or construct computational algorithms to account for the limits of directed evolution, phage display, or mutagenesis approaches. Valuable data is lost in the process. Not only might you miss winning designs, but you might not learn why the losers failed to work. This is all valuable data that would inform your next design cycle.
Tierra’s technology is adept at producing computationally designed proteins de novo purely from lists of sequences. There are no design constraints on the sequences and no need for protein expression and biochemistry expertise. All Tierra requires is your sequence list for DNA synthesis and testing through our platform. Tierra’s platform, built off of cell-free synthetic biology, removes the bottleneck of throughput that restricts testing in cells. We return physical protein to validate your designs by experimentation.
We also collect data during our experiments that can tell you about what designs are working and what are failing. For every protein, we can determine transcription, translation, stability of lysate, and efficiency of expression.
The physical proteins Tierra produces can be validated in your downstream assays. Binding can be tested through ELISA, pull-down assays, or Western blots. Your proteins can be tested for their binding affinity through Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR), Bio-Layer Interferometry (BLI), Fluorescence Polarization (FP), or thermal shifts assays. The structure of the protein can be explored via Chromic Dichromism (CD) or crystallography. Activity can be tested through fluorescent or luminescent readouts. Winning constructs can then be scaled for further protein characterization.