Gene Overexpression Service

Based on the advanced gene overexpression technology, Creative Biolabs is providing services for our clients from all over the world, especially the clients who are currently trying to or having difficulty working on drug target validation.

The identification and validation of disease-causing target genes is an essential first step in drug discovery and development. Loss-of-function construction coupled with drug-resistance is the canonical approach for discovering drug target proteins. However, there might be the case that certain drug target proteins are the essential genes, disruption of which might elicit cell death, making it impossible to identify the role of the target gene in any later process. Besides, several target proteins maintain cellular homeostasis by suppressing downstream substances. For those target proteins, gene overexpression is another option we can take for drug discovery and validation. Gene overexpression could be applied to test specific hypotheses and to identify the hypothesized targets. In these experiments, the wild-type cell lines or strains are vulnerable to the drug. Overexpression of the drug target protein could revert the effect the drug has on the phenotype, making the cell lines or the strain resistant to the drug.

Gene overexpression technique provides a powerful alternative tool to infer gene functions that remain to be discovered by gene knockout analysis or not yet possible creating targeted deletions. The rapidly growing gene expression databases and improvement in bioinformatics tools shed the light on the new strategies to discover therapeutic targets. More recently, strategies that successfully applied overexpression in additional ways emerged, expanding the overexpression repertoire.

Fig.1 Schematic Overview of the Tetracycline-regulated Gene Expression System (Evans & Mizrahi, 2015)

Application:

• Drug target identification and validation which offers insight into the function of target proteins.
• Overexpress wild-type protein in the mutant background to further study the drug-related pathway.
• Use the overexpression phenotype in epistasis tests.
• Overexpress the mutant protein to revert the deficiency.
• Generate mutations when Loss-of-function experiment is not available.
• Use output to create interaction networks.
• Use overexpression phenotype as starting point for modifier screens.
• Overexpress in heterologous organism.

Service note:
Our clients are supposed to provide target gene name, sequence or GeneBank ID.
Creative Biolabs will offer:

• Overexpression vector
• Single colony
• PCR-based detection report
• Overexpression validation report

With our extensive experience in offering gene overexpression services, experienced scientists of Creative Biolabs are pleased to tailor the best-fit research program for your purpose. If you are considering using the gene overexpression approaches, or interested in our platform, please do not hesitate to contact us for more details.

Reference:

1. Evans, J. C., & Mizrahi, V. (2015). The application of tetracyclineregulated gene expression systems in the validation of novel drug targets in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Frontiers in microbiology, 6.

For Research Use Only.