Abstract
The methylotrophic yeast Pichia pastoris is increasingly used for heterologous expression of high quality proteins in laboratory-scale (milligram) quantities. Commercially available polysaccharide-active enzyme preparations have limited applications in plant cell wall research due to their heterogeneous mix of hydrolytic activities. P. pastoris provides an ideal in vitro expression system for producing monocomponent enzymes, since it lacks endogenous plant cell wall-active enzymes and can perform eukaryotic post-translational modifications (i.e., glycosylation). We have routinely prepared cDNA constructs from Aspergillus nidulans encoding a broad array of hydrolases active on various linkages contained in plant cell wall polysaccharides. The cDNAs were inserted into the pPICZα C shuttle vector (Invitrogen) in-frame with the Saccharomyces cerevisiae α-secretion factor and expressed under the transcriptional control of the highly inducible alcohol oxidase 1 (AOX1) promoter. The enzyme products were efficiently secreted into buffered complex methanol medium (BMMY) as C-terminal his-tagged proteins for simple one-step affinity purification. The insertion of the c-Myc epitope enabled easy immunodetection. Here we present the detailed protocols for primer design, cloning, expression, and activity assays for a representative set of xylan-acting hemicellulases produced in P. pastoris.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Drs. Andrew J. Mort (Oklahoma State University) and Christopher R. Somerville (University of California, Berkeley) for their support and supervision of this study. This was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences Division grant DE-FG02-03ER15444 (to A.J.M. and C.R.S.) and USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Mid-South/Southeast Biofuels Consortium, DE-FG36-08BO88036 (to B.J.S.) Postdoctoral fellowships for S.B. provided by the Josef-Schormüller-Gedächtnisstiftung and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
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Vasu, P., Bauer, S., Savary, B.J. (2012). Cloning and Expression of Hemicellulases from Aspergillus nidulans in Pichia pastoris . In: Lorence, A. (eds) Recombinant Gene Expression. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 824. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-61779-433-9_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-61779-433-9_21
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