Baculovirus Protein Expression System—BacPAK™

The BacPAK Baculovirus Expression System expresses recombinant proteins at extremely high levels in insect host cells (1, 2). The BacPAK System offers three major advantages:

• High yield of recombinant protein. The insect host cells produce large amounts of your target protein.
• Greater similarity to naturally occurring proteins. The expressed recombinant protein is usually similar in structure, biological activity, and immunological reactivity to the naturally occurring protein because insect host cells provide post-translational processing similar to that of mammalian cells.
• High recombination efficiency. More than 90% of the viruses produced by the transfected cells carry the target protein. The specially designed BacPAK6 Viral DNA forces recombination between the virus and transfer vector, resulting in high recombination efficiency.

BacPAK Method

The target gene is inserted into a shuttle vector, which is cotransfected into insect host cells with the linearized BacPAK6 Viral DNA. The BacPAK6 DNA is missing an essential portion of the baculovirus genome. When the DNA recombines with the vector, the essential element is restored and the target gene is transferred to the baculovirus genome. Following recombination, a few viral plaques are picked and purified, and the recombinant phenotype is verified. The newly isolated recombinant virus can then be amplified and used to infect insect cell cultures to produce large amounts of the desired protein.

The BacPAK System includes the transfer vectors, BacPAK6 Viral DNA, the insect host cells needed for production of recombinant proteins and the Bacfectin Transfection Reagent for high efficiency transfections. A User Manual, sequencing/PCR primers, and control viruses are also included with the kit. For rapid determination of baculovirus titers, we recommend the BacPAK Rapid Titer Kit (Cat. No. 631406) or the BaculoELISA Kit (Cat. No. 631412). BacPAK6 Viral DNA can also be purchased separately.