Lee, Weiluo;
Pradhan, Subhas;
Zhang, Cheng;
Venanzi, Niccolo AE;
Li, Weina;
Goldrick, Stephen;
Dalby, Paul A;
(2022)
Directed evolution for soluble and active periplasmic expression of bovine enterokinase in Escherichia coli.
Scientific Reports
, 12
, Article 17721. 10.1038/s41598-022-22574-6.
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Abstract
Bovine enterokinase light chain (EKL) is an industrially useful protease for accurate removal of affinity-purification tags from high-value biopharmaceuticals. However, recombinant expression in Escherichia coli produces insoluble inclusion bodies, requiring solubilisation, refolding, and autocatalytic activation to recover functional enzyme. Error-prone PCR and DNA shuffling of the EKL gene, T7 promoter, lac operon, ribosome binding site, and pelB leader sequence, yielded 321 unique variants after screening ~ 6500 colonies. The best variants had > 11,000-fold increased total activity in lysates, producing soluble enzyme that no longer needed refolding. Further characterisation identified the factors that improved total activity from an inactive and insoluble starting point. Stability was a major factor, whereby melting temperatures > 48.4 °C enabled good expression at 37 °C. Variants generally did not alter catalytic efficiency as measured by kcat/Km, which improved for only one variant. Codon optimisation improved the total activity in lysates produced at 37 °C. However, non-optimised codons and expression at 30 °C gave the highest activity through improved protein quality, with increased kcat and Tm values. The 321 variants were statistically analysed and mapped to protein structure. Mutations detrimental to total activity and stability clustered around the active site. By contrast, variants with increased total activity tended to combine stabilising mutations that did not disrupt the active site.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Directed evolution for soluble and active periplasmic expression of bovine enterokinase in Escherichia coli |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-022-22574-6 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-22574-6 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Biocatalysis, Proteases, Protein design |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Biochemical Engineering UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10158075 |
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