Principal Investigator (PI): Dr Amelie Eriksson Karlström

Personnel: Nima Jokilaakso (PhD student), Joel Lindgren (PhD student), Anna Perols (PhD student) and Peter Järver (PostDoc)

Description: The focus of the group is to develop new protein analysis technologies that can be used to identify proteins that are up- or down-regulated in a certain cellular state, or to diagnostically monitor the level of specific disease marker proteins. The detection systems are based on the use of affinity proteins, which bind with high affinity and specificity to their respective target proteins. Most projects employ of a type of engineered affinity proteins called affibody molecules. An important aspect of the affibody molecule is that the small size of the protein (58 aa) allows for its production by total chemical synthesis using standard solid phase peptide chemistry. By using chemical synthesis, different modifications such as backbone engineering and introduction of reporter groups can readily be introduced into the protein. In recent studies, site-specific labeling of affibody molecues with different fluorophores has been employed for applications in fluorescence-based detection technologies. Chemical synthesis has also successfully been used for the introduction of different metal chelators into the affibody molecules, which can be labelled with radionuclides and used for in vivo imaging of tumors.