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Baculovirus technology. Most of the tips and hints we can offer on the use of baculoviruses for the expression of recombinant proteins are on the Vector pages. In addition there are lots of pages on the web with details of the various protocols used. An overview of the system by the inventor himself is available on the Protein Sciences website although he has recently moved on to be VP of Vaccine Development at Novavax. Some recent pages from Laurence Pearl's group at the Institute of Cancer Research (aka Domainex) are good (here) and overviews of the systems and their history are available from various commercial suppliers (below). Beware the hype however, Seakem agarose is as good as any "special" insect cell grade for plaque assays and most transfection agents work well with insect cells so you don't need a special reagent. The real secret is thoughtful construct design followed by good virology and good insect cell tissue culture,  all essentially free.

Some commercial suppliers with relevant information pages or pdfs are:

Invitrogen; Clonetech; Novagen; ABvector; Oxford Expression technologies; Pharmingen.

For  a general description of baculoviruses we recommend the excellent online teaching provided by Alan Cann at the University of Leicester.

For general information on viruses use the All the Virology on the Web site as a leaping off point for searching for what you want.

The graphics and all our manuscript artwork use the amazing (and very reasonably priced) vector drawing programme

 

Don't want to pay for any commercial software? We advise the excellent and free OpenOffice suite

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Interested in intelligent design as a driver in biology and evolution? Go here to find like minded souls.