In the post-genomic era, increasingly greater demands and expectations are being placed on protein production laboratories to produce more proteins and in faster timelines. This has been coupled with an exponential increase in the number of requests for the production of proteins which lack structural and functional information. No longer can groups use literature available in the public domain solely to drive their expression strategy, and moreover current expression and concomitant purification strategies clearly do not meet modern-day demands for protein production. This review will therefore attempt to provide a definitive review of current 'best in class' cloning, expression and purification systems, and the adaptations and developments that have been made by laboratories, both academic and industrial, to enhance protein production throughput. (c) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.