Expression of porcine prorelaxin in transgenic tobacco

Development and Expression of Subunit Vaccines Against Viruses in Plants

Various systems exist for the robust production of recombinant proteins. However, only a few systems are optimal for human vaccine protein production. Plant-based transient protein expression systems offer an advantageous alternative to costly mammalian cell culture-based systems and can perform posttranslational modifications due to the presence of an endomembrane system that is largely similar to that of the animal cell. Technological advances in expression vectors for transient expression in the last two decades have produced new plant expression systems with the flexibility and speed that cannot be matched by those based on mammalian or insect cell culture. The rapid and high-level protein production capability of transient expression systems makes them the optimal system to quickly and versatilely develop and produce vaccines against viruses such as 2019-nCoV that have sudden and unpredictable outbreaks. Here, expression of antiviral subunit vaccines in Nicotiana benthamiana plants via transient expression is demonstrated.

Production of human pro-relaxin H2 in the yeast Pichia pastoris

Background

Initially known as the reproductive hormone, relaxin was shown to possess other therapeutically useful properties that include extracellular matrix remodeling, anti-inflammatory, anti-ischemic and angiogenic effects. All these findings make relaxin a potential drug for diverse medical applications. Its precursor, pro-relaxin, is an 18 kDa protein, that shows activity in in vitro assays. Since extraction of relaxin from animal tissues raises several issues, prokaryotes and eukaryotes were both used as expression systems for recombinant relaxin production. Most productive results were obtained when using Escherichia coli as a host for human relaxin expression. However, in such host, relaxin precipitated in the form of inclusion bodies and, therefore, required several expensive recovery steps as cell lysis, refolding and reduction.

Results

To overcome the issues related to prokaryotic expression here we report the production and purification of secreted human pro-relaxin H2 by using the methylotrophic yeast Pichia pastoris as expression host. The methanol inducible promoter AOX1 was used to drive expression of the native and histidine tagged forms of pro-relaxin H2 in dual phase fed-batch experiments on the 22 L scale. Both protein forms presented the correct structure, as determined by mass spectrometry and western blotting analyses, and demonstrated to be biologically active in immune enzymatic assays. The presence of the tag allowed to simplify pro-relaxin purification obtaining higher purity.

Conclusions

This work presents a strategy for microbial production of recombinant human pro-relaxin H2 in Pichia pastoris that allowed the obtainment of biologically active pro-hormone, with a final concentration in the fermentation broth ranging between 10 and 14 mg/L of product, as determined by densitometric analyses.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12896-016-0319-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Transient Protein Expression by Agroinfiltration in Lettuce

Current systems of recombinant protein production include bacterial, insect, and mammalian cell culture. However, these platforms are expensive to build and operate at commercial scales and/or have limited abilities to produce complex proteins. In recent years, plant-based expression systems have become top candidates for the production of recombinant proteins as they are highly scalable, robust, safe, and can produce complex proteins due to having a eukaryotic endomembrane system. Newly developed "deconstructed" viral vectors delivered via Agrobacterium tumefaciens (agroinfiltration) have enabled robust plant-based production of proteins with a wide range of applications. The leafy Lactuca sativa (lettuce) plant with its strong foundation in agriculture is an excellent host for pharmaceutical protein production. Here, we describe a method for agroinfiltration of lettuce that can rapidly produce high levels of recombinant proteins in a matter of days and has the potential to be scaled up to an agricultural level.

Efficient agroinfiltration of plants for high-level transient expression of recombinant proteins

Mammalian cell culture is the major platform for commercial production of human vaccines and therapeutic proteins. However, it cannot meet the increasing worldwide demand for pharmaceuticals due to its limited scalability and high cost. Plants have shown to be one of the most promising alternative pharmaceutical production platforms that are robust, scalable, low-cost and safe. The recent development of virus-based vectors has allowed rapid and high-level transient expression of recombinant proteins in plants. To further optimize the utility of the transient expression system, we demonstrate a simple, efficient and scalable methodology to introduce target-gene containing Agrobacterium into plant tissue in this study. Our results indicate that agroinfiltration with both syringe and vacuum methods have resulted in the efficient introduction of Agrobacterium into leaves and robust production of two fluorescent proteins; GFP and DsRed. Furthermore, we demonstrate the unique advantages offered by both methods. Syringe infiltration is simple and does not need expensive equipment. It also allows the flexibility to either infiltrate the entire leave with one target gene, or to introduce genes of multiple targets on one leaf. Thus, it can be used for laboratory scale expression of recombinant proteins as well as for comparing different proteins or vectors for yield or expression kinetics. The simplicity of syringe infiltration also suggests its utility in high school and college education for the subject of biotechnology. In contrast, vacuum infiltration is more robust and can be scaled-up for commercial manufacture of pharmaceutical proteins. It also offers the advantage of being able to agroinfiltrate plant species that are not amenable for syringe infiltration such as lettuce and Arabidopsis. Overall, the combination of syringe and vacuum agroinfiltration provides researchers and educators a simple, efficient, and robust methodology for transient protein expression. It will greatly facilitate the development of pharmaceutical proteins and promote science education.