Suma Sreenivas

Enhancement in production of recombinant two-chain Insulin Glargine by over-expression of Kex2 protease in Pichia pastoris

Glargine is an analog of Insulin currently being produced by recombinant DNA technology using two different hosts namely Escherichia coli and Pichia pastoris. Production from E. coli involves the steps of extraction of inclusion bodies by cell lysis, refolding, proteolytic cleavage and purification. In P. pastoris, a single-chain precursor with appropriate disulfide bonding is secreted to the medium. Downstream processing currently involves use of trypsin which converts the precursor into two-chain final product. The use of trypsin in the process generates additional impurities due to presence of Lys and Arg residues in the Glargine molecule. In this study, we describe an alternate approach involving over-expression of endogenous Kex2 proprotein convertase, taking advantage of dibasic amino acid sequence (Arg-Arg) at the end of B-chain of Glargine. KEX2 gene over-expression in Pichia was accomplished by using promoters of varying strengths to ensure production of greater levels of fully functional two-chain Glargine product, confirmed by HPLC and mass analysis. In conclusion, this new production process involving Kex2 protease over-expression improves the downstream process efficiency, reduces the levels of impurities generated and decreases the use of raw materials.

Isolation, characterization and evaluation of the Pichia pastoris sorbitol dehydrogenase promoter for expression of heterologous proteins.

Sorbitol is used as a non-repressive carbon source to develop fermentation process for Mut(s) recombinant clones obtained using the AOX1 promoter in Pichia pastoris. Sorbitol dehydrogenase is an enzyme in the carbohydrate metabolism that catalyzes reduction of D-fructose into D-sorbitol in the presence of NADH. The small stretch of 211bps upstream region of sorbitol dehydrogenase coding gene has all the promoter elements like CAAT box, GC box, etc. It is able to promote protein production under repressive as well as non-repressive carbon sources. In this study, the strength of the sorbitol dehydrogenase promoter was evaluated by expression of two heterologous proteins: human serum albumin and erythrina trypsin inhibitor. Sorbitol dehydrogenase promoter allowed constitutive expression of recombinant proteins in all carbon sources that were tested to grow P. pastoris and showed activity similar to GAP promoter. The sorbitol dehydrogenase promoter was active in all the growth phases of the P. pastoris.