Design and production of a novel antimicrobial fusion protein in Escherichia coli
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Wibowo, David
Sainsbury, Frank
Zhao, Chun-Xia
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Abstract
In recent years, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have attracted increasing attention. The microbial cells provide a simple, cost-effective platform to produce AMPs in industrial quantities. While AMP production as fusion proteins in microorganisms is commonly used, the recovery of AMPs necessitates the use of expensive proteases and extra purification steps. Here, we develop a novel fusion protein DAMP4-F-pexiganan comprising a carrier protein DAMP4 linked to the AMP, pexiganan, through a long, flexible linker. We show that this fusion protein can be purified using a non-chromatography approach and exhibits the same antimicrobial activity as the chemically synthesized pexiganan peptide without any cleavage step. Activity of the fusion protein is dependent on a long, flexible linker between the AMP and carrier domains, as well as on the expression conditions of the fusion protein, with low-temperature expression promoting better folding of the AMP domain. The production of DAMP4-F-pexiganan circumvents the time-consuming and costly steps of chromatography-based purification and enzymatic cleavages, therefore shows considerable advantages over traditional microbial production of AMPs. We expect this novel fusion protein, and the studies on the effect of linker and expression conditions on its antimicrobial activity, will broaden the rational design and production of antimicrobial products based on AMPs.
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Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology
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© 2018 Springer Berlin / Heidelberg. This is an electronic version of an article published in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, 2018, Volume 102, Issue 20, pp 8763–8772. Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology is available online at: http://link.springer.com/ with the open URL of your article.
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Gene expression (incl. microarray and other genome-wide approaches)
Bioprocessing, bioproduction and bioproducts
Industrial molecular engineering of nucleic acids and proteins