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From 2012.igem.org

Introduction

The Polero (potato leaf roll virus) virus coat proteins can be used as building blocks to form VLP’s, which has never been done before in E. coli. Therefore we will focus on the use of Polero virus coat proteins to make self-assembling VLP’s. If this step succeeds, further modifications will be done. After formation of the VLP’s, the spike will be presented on the outside, so we will mainly focus on modifying the spike on the outside. We will start with small peptides and then try to add bigger ligands; finally we will see where the boundary lies of how big the proteins can be that are added to the end of the spike.

Aim: Our primary aim is to get self-assembling VLP’s from the Polero virus in E. coli. If we succeed, we can attempt to modify the spike on the outside.