Systematic identification of a panel of strong promoter regions from Listeria monocytogenes for fine-tuning gene expression

BACKGROUND: Attenuated Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) has been widely used as a vaccine vector in the prevention and treatment of pathogen infection and tumor diseases. In addition, previous studies have proved that the attenuated Lm can protect zebrafish from Vibrio infections, indicating that the attenuated Lm has a good application prospect in the field of aquatic vaccines. However, the limitation mainly lies in the lack of a set of well-characterized natural promoters for the expression of target antigens in attenuated Lm. RESULTS: In our study, candidate strong promoters were identified through RNA-seq analysis, and characterized in Lm through enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP). Nine native promoters that showed stronger activities than that of the known strong promoter P(36) under two tested temperatures (28 and 37 °C) were selected from the set, and P(29) with the highest activity was 24-fold greater than P(36). Furthermore, we demonstrated that P(29) could initiate EGFP expression in ZF4 cells and zebrafish embryos. CONCLUSIONS: This well-characterized promoter library can be used to fine-tune the expression of different proteins in Lm. The availability of a well-characterized promoter toolbox of Lm is essential for the analysis of yield increase for biotechnology applications. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12934-021-01628-w.