Cargando…

Expression of proteins in Escherichia coli as fusions with maltose-binding protein to rescue non-expressed targets in a high-throughput protein-expression and purification pipeline

Despite recent advances, the expression of heterologous proteins in Escherichia coli for crystallization remains a nontrivial challenge. The present study investigates the efficacy of maltose-binding protein (MBP) fusion as a general strategy for rescuing the expression of target proteins. From a gr...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Hewitt, Stephen N., Choi, Ryan, Kelley, Angela, Crowther, Gregory J., Napuli, Alberto J., Van Voorhis, Wesley C.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: International Union of Crystallography 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3169393/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21904041
http://dx.doi.org/10.1107/S1744309111022159
Descripción
Sumario:Despite recent advances, the expression of heterologous proteins in Escherichia coli for crystallization remains a nontrivial challenge. The present study investigates the efficacy of maltose-binding protein (MBP) fusion as a general strategy for rescuing the expression of target proteins. From a group of sequence-verified clones with undetectable levels of protein expression in an E. coli T7 expression system, 95 clones representing 16 phylogenetically diverse organisms were selected for recloning into a chimeric expression vector with an N-terminal histidine-tagged MBP. PCR-amplified inserts were annealed into an identical ligation-independent cloning region in an MBP-fusion vector and were analyzed for expression and solubility by high-throughput nickel-affinity binding. This approach yielded detectable expression of 72% of the clones; soluble expression was visible in 62%. However, the solubility of most proteins was marginal to poor upon cleavage of the MBP tag. This study offers large-scale evidence that MBP can improve the soluble expression of previously non-expressing proteins from a variety of eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms. While the behavior of the cleaved proteins was disappointing, further refinements in MBP tagging may permit the more widespread use of MBP-fusion proteins in crystallographic studies.