Profit from the benefits of our technology for nucleic acid delivery into bacterial cells yourself. Minimum preparation, easy workflow, fast results.
With great excitement we annouce our new product line. BPP has engineered a novel multi-functional designer protein termed Bioportide™. This agent quickly, spontaneously, reversibly, and reliably binds nucleic acids and transports them across the host’s cell membrane utilizing a specialized, N-terminal cell penetrating peptide moiety. Upon membrane crossing, nucleic acid is released to the cytoplasma and becomes functional.
Figure | Mock-up of our new Bioportide Kit for bacterial transformation.
"Next Generation Transformation"
Bioportides are a branch of the Better Peptides Platform Technology and as such they inherit a few handy functionalities.
First, Bioportides contain a signal driving expression to inclusion bodies in bacterial cultures. This way, production of Bioportides benefits from all the Better Peptides advantages.
Second, the cargo binding domain has been optimized to recruit nucleic acids (i.e., DNA and RNA) via the ribose carbohydrate residue, a spontanous and reliable complex formation ensures multivalent binding of both, cargo and host cell for successful transformation/transfection of the host cell. And last but not least, a specialized cell penetrating peptide moiety carries the key to the host cell. From a growing collection of cell penetrating peptide sequences, we find those that are most effective in penetrating important model organisms and cell types across all kingdoms of life.
Today, we begin to share our findings on the most basic and probably most important of research model organisms, the gram-negative bacterium Escherichia coli. More will follow in due time.
Figure | Bioportide model as predicted by Google Alphafold 3. Molecular model was visualized with UCSF ChimeraX (University of California, San Francisco) and further edited in Adobe Photoshop.
Figure | Graphical Abstract of the Bioportide workflow.
Minimum preparation, easy workflow, fast results.
The protocol is remarkably easy and fast. Purified nucleic acids are mixed with a Bioportide™ solution in a prescribed ratio, using our recommended buffer system. Within minutes, Bioportides™ will recruit nucleic acids spontaneously to form an active complex. Simply add this solution to mid-growth phase bacteria, incubate briefly, and grow the cells on or in selective growth media – done. It is that easy.
Excellent transformation efficiency shown with E.coli B27 cells and a 10 kb plasmid (pUC based). No special competency needed. Bioportides™ can deliver even large plasmids, while keeping cells vital and ready to grow. Neither incubation period on ice nor heat shock is needed, both preserving cells vitality. Rapid kick-in of growth was demonstrated using in solution online growth monitoring (aquilabiolabs GmbH / sbi,MPS-System).
Figure | Comparison of transformation efficiencies in heat-shock treated Ca2+ competent cells and Bioportide BP17 treated non-competent E.coli DH5alpha cells (invitrogen) using (A) pUG plasmid and (b) a 10 kb plasmid encoding for GFP.