Efforts to express human therapeutic proteins in photosynthetic organisms have\nbeen described in the literature. Regarding microalgae, most of the research\nentailed a heterologous transformation of the chloroplast, but transformant cells\nfailed to accumulate the desired recombinant proteins in high quantity. The present\nwork provides methods and DNA construct formulations for over-expressing in\nphotosynthetic cyanobacteria, at the protein level, human-origin bio-pharmaceutical\nand bio-therapeutic proteins. Proof-of-concept evidence is provided for the design and\nreduction to practice of â??fusion constructs as protein overexpression vectorsâ? for the\ngeneration of the bio-therapeutic protein interferon alpha-2 (IFN). IFN is a member of\nthe Type I interferon cytokine family, well-known for its antiviral and anti-proliferative\nfunctions. Fusion construct formulations enabled accumulation of IFN up to 12% of\ntotal cellular protein in soluble form. In addition, the work reports on the isolation and\npurification of the fusion IFN protein and preliminary verification of its antiviral activity.\nCombining the expression and purification protocols developed here, it is possible to\nproduce fairly large quantities of interferon in these photosynthetic microorganisms,\ngenerated from sunlight, CO2, and H2O.
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