Strategies to maximize heterologous protein expression in Escherichia coli with minimal cost

Automation and miniaturization are key issues of high-throughput research projects in the post-genomic era. The implementation of robotics and parallelization has enabled researchers to process large numbers of protein targets for structural studies in a short time with reasonable cost efficiency. However, the cost of implementing the robotics and parallelization often prohibit their use in the traditional academic laboratory. Fortunately, multiple groups have made significant efforts to minimize the cost of heterologous protein expression for the production of protein samples in quantities suitable for high resolution structural studies. In this review, we describe recent efforts to continue to minimize the cost for the parallel processing of multiple protein targets and focus on those materials and strategies that are highly suitable for the traditional academic laboratory.