Efficient Production of an Engineered Apoptin from Chicken Anemia Virus in a Recombinant E. coli for Tumor Therapeutic Applications

BMC Biotechnology

Research Article

Fang-Chun Sun¹  Meng-Shiunn Lee²  Hao-Yuan Cheng³  Hsi-Jien Chen⁴  Yi-Yang Lien⁵  Guan-Hua Lai⁶  Shin-Huei Feng⁶  Jason T C Tzen⁶  Chi-Hung Huang⁷  Jung Chao⁸  Meng-Shiou Lee⁹ 

[1] Department of Bioresources, Da-Yeh University, 51591, Changhua, Taiwan, Republic of China;Department of Medical Research, Tung’s Taichung MetroHarbor Hospital, 43344, Taichung, Taiwan, Republic of China;Department of Nursing, Chung Jen College of Nursing, Health Sciences and Management, Chia-Yi, Taiwan;Department of Safety, Health and Environmental Engineering, Mingchi University of Technology, 24301, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China;Department of Veterinary Medicine, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, 91201, Pingtung, Taiwan, Republic of China;Graduate Institute of Biotechnology, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan;Graduate School of Biotechnology, Hung Kuang University, 43302, Taichung, Taiwan, Republic of China;Institute of Pharmacology, National Yang-Ming University, College of Medicine, 11221, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China;School of Chinese Pharmaceutical Sciences and Chinese Medicine Resources, China Medical University, 40402, Taichung, Taiwan, Republic of China;

关键词: Codon Usage;    Apoptotic Activity;    Protein Drug;    IPTG Induction;    Rare Codon;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6750-12-27

 received in 2012-03-19, accepted in 2012-06-06,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundApoptin, a nonstructural protein encoded by the VP3 gene of chicken anemia virus (CAV), has been shown to not only induce apoptosis when introduced into the precursors of chicken thymocytes, but has been found to specifically kill human cancer cells, tumor cell and transformed cells without affecting the proliferation of normal cells. This tumor-specific apoptotic characteristic of the protein potentially may allow the development of a protein drug that has applications in tumor therapy. However, several major problems, which include poor expression and poor protein solubility, have hampered the production of apoptin in bacteria.ResultsSignificantly increased expression of recombinant full-length apoptin that originated from chicken anemia virus was demonstrated using an E. coli expression system. The CAV VP3 gene was fused with a synthetic sequence containing a trans-acting activator of transcription (TAT) protein transduction domain (PTD). The resulting construct was cloned into various different expression vectors and these were then expressed in various E. coli strains. The expression of the TAT-Apoptin in E. coli was significantly increased when TAT-Apoptin was fused with GST-tag rather than a His-tag. When the various rare amino acid codons of apoptin were optimized, the expression level of the GST-TAT-Apoptinopt in E. coli BL21(DE3) was significantly further increased. The highest protein expression level obtained was 8.33 g/L per liter of bacterial culture after induction with 0.1 mM IPTG for 4 h at 25 °C. Moreover, approximately 90% of the expressed GST-TAT-Apoptinopt under these conditions was soluble. After purification by GST affinity chromatography, the purified recombinant TAT-Apoptinopt protein was used to evaluate the recombinant protein’s apoptotic activity on tumor cells. The results demonstrated that the E. coli-expressed GST-TAT-apoptinopt showed apoptotic activity and was able to induce human premyelocytic leukemia HL-60 cells to enter apoptosis.ConclusionsOn expression in E. coli, purified recombinant TAT-Apoptinopt that has been fused to a GST tag and had its codons optimized, was found to have great potential. This protein may in the future allow the development of a therapeutic protein that is able to specifically kill tumor cells.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Lee et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.