A Two-Step Refolding of Acid-Denatured Microbial Transglutaminase Escaping from the Aggregation-Prone Intermediate

Abstract

Microbial transglutaminase (MTG) is a monomeric globular enzyme made of 331 amino acid residues. The conformation of MTG was examined over the pH 2.0-6.0 region using circular dichroism (CD) and 1-anilino-8-naphthalenesulfonate (ANS). Under conditions of low ionic strength, a decrease of pH below 4 caused a stepwise unfolding with an intermediate exhibiting specific ANS-binding before full unfolding at pH 2.0. At high ionic strength, the decrease of pH led to only an intermediate without further unfolding. The intermediate corresponds to the molten globule state with a secondary structure similar to the native state but disordered tertiary structures. A pH- and NaCl concentration-dependent phase diagram showed that the fully unfolded state exists only under limited conditions of low pH and a low NaCl concentration. Although a refolding yield by the direct jump to pH 6.0 was low, a two-step refolding with incubation at pH 4.0, where MTG is marginally stable, and a subsequent jump to pH 6.0 improved the yield by suppressing the kinetic traps. We propose that the two-step refolding is useful for improving the yield of larger proteins with a high pI value.