Wyatt Technology has announced that Pfizer Global R+D has chosen its Dawn Heleos Multi-Angle Light Scattering (MALS) instrument to monitor protein reagent quality in drug discovery.
The instrument's analytical capabilities are illustrated in an application note, titled 'Using MALS to Ensure Protein Reagent Quality in Drug Discovery', which is available to download free of charge.
MALS overcomes protein-related limitations, monitoring solution properties of proteins while changes to reagents are taking place.
The application note demonstrates how light scattering data can be used to elucidate the solution properties of a protein expressed from two different constructs.
The first construct was the shorter of the two, designed for crystallisation studies.
Experimental results, combined with the fact that the enzyme showed activity and was the predominant species in mass spectrometry, would lead to the erroneous confirmation of the suitability of the reagent.
The Dawn Heleos MALS data, however, showed that the enzyme was very heterogeneous.
The second construct, which was designed to address this problem, was the full-length enzyme.
In that case, the Dawn Heleos demonstrated that the protein was in its biologically active form (dimer) and was highly homogenous.
This information provided confidence to the project team at Pfizer to move forward with the second construct for crystallography, NMR and HTS studies.
