Engineering a novel endopeptidase based on SARS 3CL(pro)

A 3C-like protease (3CL(pro)) from the severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus (SARS-CoV) is required for viral replication, cleaving the replicase polyproteins at 11 sites with the conserved Gln↓(Ser, Ala, Gly) sequences. In this study, we developed a mutant 3CL(pro) (T25G) with an expanded S1′ space that demonstrates 43.5-fold better k(cat)/K(m) compared with wild-type in cleaving substrates with a larger Met at P1′ and is suitable for tag removal from recombinant fusion proteins. Two vectors for expressing fusion proteins with the T25G recognition site (Ala-Val-Leu-Gln↓Met) in Escherichia coli and yeast were constructed. Identical cloning sites were used in these vectors for parallel cloning. PstI was chosen as a 5′ cloning site because it overlapped the nucleotide sequence encoding the protease site and avoided addition of extra amino acids at the N terminus of recombinant proteins. 3CL(pro) (T25G) was found to have a 3-fold improvement over TEV(pro) in tag cleavage at each respective preferred cleavage site.