What Is Recombinant Protein Production?
Recombinant protein production is the expression of proteins that have been produced by recombinant DNA techniques. This process enables these substances to be made in large quantities. Such mass production is done both for laboratory study and for industrial production. This technique is often used to produce human growth hormone and insulin. Obtaining human growth hormone through recombinant protein production is a huge improvement over obtaining it from cadavers because the presence of proteins obtained from cadavers occasionally resulted in disease transmission. Making insulin in this way is also beneficial because it has enabled variants of insulin to be made that have different pharmacological actions in the body. Proteins are chains of amino acids, encoded by DNA. The genes that code for these proteins are put into special vectors, or units of DNA. Vectors are chosen that will produce large amounts of the desired protein. This is known as overexpression.
