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A new strategy for full-length Ebola virus glycoprotein expression in E.coli

  • Research article
  • Published:
Virologica Sinica

Abstract

Ebola virus (EBOV) causes severe hemorrhagic fever in humans and non-human primates with high rates of fatality. Glycoprotein (GP) is the only envelope protein of EBOV, which may play a critical role in virus attachment and entry as well as stimulating host protective immune responses. However, the lack of expression of full-length GP in Escherichia coli hinders the further study of its function in viral pathogenesis. In this study, the vp40 gene was fused to the full-length gp gene and cloned into a prokaryotic expression vector. We showed that the VP40-GP and GP-VP40 fusion proteins could be expressed in E.coli at 16 °C. In addition, it was shown that the position of vp40 in the fusion proteins affected the yields of the fusion proteins, with a higher level of production of the fusion protein when vp40 was upstream of gp compared to when it was downstream. The results provide a strategy for the expression of a large quantity of EBOV full-length GP, which is of importance for further analyzing the relationship between the structure and function of GP and developing an antibody for the treatment of EBOV infection.

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Acknowledgments

This project was jointly supported by the National Science and Technology Major Project (2012ZX10004219 and 2012ZX10004403), the Presidential Fund of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Wuhan Key Laboratory on Emerging Infectious Diseases and Biosafety. We thank Dr. Guoliang Lu (Structural Biology of Viral Genome Replication, Wuhan Institute of Virology) for helpful advice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Agricultural and Environmental Microbiology, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430071, China

    Junjie Zai, Yinhua Yi, Han Xia & Zhiming Yuan

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Junjie Zai & Yinhua Yi

  3. Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430071, China

    Bo Zhang

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  1. Junjie Zai
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  2. Yinhua Yi
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Correspondence to Zhiming Yuan.

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ORCID: 0000-0002-3234-9616

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Zai, J., Yi, Y., Xia, H. et al. A new strategy for full-length Ebola virus glycoprotein expression in E.coli . Virol. Sin. 31, 500–508 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12250-016-3845-y

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