Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology

, Volume 84, Issue 2, pp 383–388 | Cite as

Production of a cytotoxic cationic antibacterial peptide in Escherichia coli using SUMO fusion partner

  • Jian Feng Li
  • Jie Zhang
  • Ren Song
  • Jia Xin Zhang
  • Yang Shen
  • Shuang Quan Zhang
Methods
First Online:
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:

Abstract

Antibacterial peptide CM4 (ABP-CM4) is a small cationic peptide with broad-spectrum activities against bacteria, fungi, and tumor cells, which may possibly be used as an antimicrobial agent. We report here the application of small ubiquitin-related modifier (SUMO) fusion technology to the expression and purification of cationic antibacterial peptide ABP-CM4. The fusion protein expressed in a soluble form was purified to a purity of 90% by Ni-IDA chromatography and 112 mg protein of interest was obtained per liter of fermentation culture. After the SUMO–CM4 fusion protein was cleaved by the SUMO protease at 30 °C for 1 h, the cleaved sample was re-applied to a Ni-IDA. Finally, about 24 mg recombinant CM4 was obtained from 1 l fermentation culture with no less than 96% purity and the recombinant CM4 had similar antimicrobial properties to the synthetic CM4. Thus, the SUMO-mediated peptide expression and purification system potentially could be employed for the production of recombinant cytotoxic peptides.

Keywords

Antibacterial peptide ABP-CM4 SUMO Escherichia coli 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Grants of Nanjing Normal University and Jiangsu Province Graduate Innovation Project (No. CX07S-020z) administered by Prof. Zhang.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag 2009

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jian Feng Li
    • 1
  • Jie Zhang
    • 1
  • Ren Song
    • 1
  • Jia Xin Zhang
    • 1
  • Yang Shen
    • 1
  • Shuang Quan Zhang
    • 1
    • 2
  1. 1.Jiangsu Province Key Laboratory for Molecular and Medical Biotechnology, Life Science CollegeNanjing Normal UniversityNanjingPeople’s Republic of China
  2. 2.Jiangsu Province Key Laboratory for Molecular and Medical Biotechnology, Jiangsu Engineering Research Center for Biomedical Function Materials, Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Supermolecular Medicinal Materials and ApplicationsNanjing Normal UniversityNanjingPeople’s Republic of China

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