Digging Into Lab Work

It has been an incredibly busy time for our team. We continue to grow and expand the pool of volunteers who are working to make Open Insulin happen. We are making sure we have all the lab equipment, and have successfully repaired an old UV-vis spectrophotometer to use with this project! The main capability this provides is that it lets us detect DNA and proteins as well as cells.

Proinsulin Progress

We have one group working in the lab to show that we are making proInsulin from our first construct. Some of the work we are currently working on includes:

- Carrying out expression and purification protocols twice a week for practice and to refine growth, induction, and purification parameters

- Looking at solution conditions in purification from cell lysate supernatant

- Starting purification from inclusion bodies

- Ordering a second construct

Protein Modeling

Our second group is focused on protein design and modeling. Initially the group is working on the design of a linker between insulin and the helical subunits of the leucine zipper designing in BioPython. This is longer-term work on a second option for making insulin, but still a very exciting part of the project as we are using this as an opportunity to have one of the team members, Noel Carrascal, lead a class on protein design and modeling on Friday evenings. We are making progress on overhead tasks, configuring software, and the basics. We will be sharing the results of this work as it develops!

Our team continues to be motivated by all the news in the press about the ever rising costs of medications. We’ve gotten a more efficient system in place to organize our work, with a weekly team meeting (and onboarding of new members) on Wednesday evenings, lab work every Sunday, and a signup sheet for volunteers to complete pieces of lab work throughout the week.

Our next few notes will dive into more details on the many things we mentioned!