Protein expression-yeast

Yeast is an excellent system for the expression of recombinant eukaryotic proteins. Both endogenous and heterologous proteins can be overexpressed in yeast (Phan et al., 2001; Ton and Rao, 2004). Because yeast is easy to manipulate genetically, a strain can be optimized for the expression of a specific protein. Many eukaryotic proteins contain posttranslational modifications that can be performed in yeast but not in bacterial expression systems. In comparison with mammalian cell culture expression systems, growing yeast is both faster and less expensive, and large-scale cultures can be performed using fermentation. While several different yeast expression systems exist, this chapter focuses on the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and will briefly describe some options to consider when selecting vectors and tags to be used for protein expression. Throughout this chapter, the expression and purification of yeast eIF3 is shown as an example alongside a general scheme outline.