Abstract
To our best knowledge, all of the fungal immunomodulatory proteins (FIPs) have been successfully extracted and identified in Basidomycetes, with only the exception of FIP from ascomycete Nectria haematococca (FIP-nha) discovered through homology alignment most recently. In this work, a gene encoding FIP-nha was synthesized and recombinantly expressed in an Escherichia coli expression system. SDS-PAGE and MALDI-MS analyses of recombinant FIP-nha (rFIP-nha) indicated that the gene was successfully expressed. The yield of the bioactive FIP-nha protein was 42.7 mg/L. In vitro assays of biological activity indicated that the rFIP-nha caused hemagglutination of human and rabbit red blood cells, significantly stimulated mouse spleen lymphocyte proliferation, and enhanced expression of interleukin-2 (IL-2) released from mouse splenocytes, revealing a strong antitumor effect against HL60, HepG2 and MGC823. Through this work, we constructed a rapid and efficient method of FIP production, and suggested that FIP-nha is a valuable candidate for use in future medical care and pharmaceutical products.
Highlights
Medicinal mushrooms are widely used to treat malignancies in folk herbal therapies [1]
fungal immunomodulatory proteins (FIPs) can stimulate the proliferation of mouse splenocytes [9] and human peripheral blood lymphocytes [10,11], leading to expression changes in several cytokines including interleukin-2 (IL-2), interferon-γ (IFN-γ), and tumor necrosis factor-α [12]
The deduced FIP-nha consists of 114 residues, lacking cysteine, histidine and methionine residues, which are typical of the FIPs family
Summary
Medicinal mushrooms are widely used to treat malignancies in folk herbal therapies [1]. FIPs belong to a new protein family with high sequence and structural similarities [5,6]. Nowadays the yeast and insect cell expression systems are commonly used in FIPs production, with regards to the proper folding and modification after transcription, especially the glycosylation. These two expression systems are faced with the disadvantages of long growth cycle, high cost, and complicated purification procedure. We first successfully expressed FIP-nha in an E. coli expression system with a GST tag, and investigated its immunomodulatory and antitumor activities in vitro
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