GE Healthcare’s Solution for Unattended Multistep Purification of Tagged Proteins and Monoclonal Antibosies is ÄKTAxpress

ÄKTAxpress is an intelligent and automated protein purification system for every lab. It provides proteins in preparative amounts at the highest possible purity with minimum hands-on time.

Protein purification is often seen as a bottleneck in a laboratory workflow. ÄKTAxpress is a chromatography system designed for automated multidimensional purification of affinity tagged proteins and monoclonal antibodies. The high purity (95% or greater) and homogeneity achieved by multistep protein purification is a prerequisite for success in, for example, 3-D structure determination and functional studies. For MAbs, it delivers the highest possible throughput of pure antibodies for pre-clinical screening without risk of sample contamination.

The complete solution includes hardware, software and media specifically designed to work together. This solution has been developed to provide time savings while minimizing user effort. The need for manual intervention in the purification and maintenance schemes has been eliminated. An extensive range of prepacked columns eliminates time-consuming column packing and helps to ensure reproducible results. There are now 28 optimized protocols supporting purification of single- or double-tagged proteins expressed in high and low amounts. It is also possible to automate removal of the tag by using off- or on-column tag cleavage procedures.

The system has a modular design which gives a high degree of adaptability. For high throughput needs, it can easily be expanded from 1 to 12 modules, all controlled from the same computer in parallel. Each module can process 4 samples simultaneously, providing up to 50 mg of pure target protein per sample.

ÄKTAxpress for straight forward purification of tagged proteins and MAbs can run unattended, leaving the operators’ time free for other challenging tasks.