Immobilization of Ulp1 protease on NHS-activated Sepharose: a useful tool for cleavage of the SUMO tag of recombinant proteins

OBJECTIVE: To fabricate an active and stable enzyme through covalent immobilization, a Ubl-specific protease (Ulp1) was used to cleave small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) fusion proteins. RESULTS: We immobilized Ulp1 on N-hydroxysuccinimide (NHS)-activated Sepharose with a coupling efficiency of 1.7 mg/ml. The immobilized Ulp1 maintains 95% substrate-cleavage ability and significantly enhances pH and thermal stability, especially can withstand pH of 10.5. Besides resistance against some small molecules, the immobilized Ulp1 can tolerate 15% (v/v) DMSO and 20% (v/v) ethanol. It can be reused for more than 15 batch reactions with 90% activity retention. This provides a fast purification system to quickly obtain cleaved recombinant proteins with 95% purity from cell lysates with the application of immobilized Ulp1. CONCLUSIONS: Ulp1 used in immobilization form is a potentially useful tool for cleavage of SUMO-tagged proteins and may reduce time and cost of protein purification. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10529-017-2330-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.