Cloning and the expression of the protein fusion enterocin-nisin-epidermicin T as a candidate for the treatment of gastric cancer

Abstract

Gastric cancer is the fourth most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death in the world. Because conventional therapies, including chemotherapy, surgery, radiation therapy, etc., are associated with damage to healthy cells, gastric cancer treatment remains a major challenge today. In recent years, the use of bacteriocins has become one of the emerging options in the treatment of gastric cancer. This project aims to clone and express the fusion gene, including three bacteriocins of enterocin, nisin, and epidermicin, and to produce recombinant protein as a candidate for gastric cancer treatment.The sequence of bacteriocins was extracted from NCBI and cloning and induction of expression was per-formed with isopropyl thiogalactosidase (IPTG) and evaluated by SDS-PAGE and confirmed by Western blot.The enterocin-nisin-epidermicin fusion gene was cloned in the plasmid pet 22b and its expression was confirmed using Western blot. The results showed protein fusion induced the highest level of apoptosis in AGS cells. AGS cells which treated with concentrations of nisin-enterocin-epidermicin protein fusion exhibited increasing levels of apoptosis. Today, antimicrobial peptides, including bacteriocins, have attracted the attention of scientists as an alternative treatment. Because the fusion protein has been produced and purified in this study, it can be further studied in the future as one of the suitable candidates for study of treatment of gastric cancer.