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Method Article
Jan Wehkamp
Wehkamp Lab, Dr. Margarete Fischer-Bosch-Institute of Clinical Pharmacology, Stuttgart
Corresponding Author
License:
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 3.0 License. Read Full License
Antimicrobial peptides represent the first-line host defence against microbial pathogens and an essential component of innate immunity. They have received growing interest because of their potential use as therapeutic antibiotics. Due to the fact that most antimicrobial peptides are toxic to prokaryotic host cells, they are currently often produced by chemical synthesis. However, this is too costly for them to be used when large quantities of antimicrobial peptides are required for investigations and clinical trials. Thus, the convenience and cost efficiencies of bacterial production of antimicrobial peptides have become a bottleneck problem.
As an important group of antimicrobial peptides human ß-defensins are cationic peptides with 38-47 amino acid residues showing three strands of anti-parallel β-sheets that provide a compact small structure [1,2]. We describe an optimized strategy for recombinant expression of hBD-1 and its mutants in Escherichia coli, to efficiently produce milligram quantities of pure oxidized and correctly folded hBD-1, which was converted into its fully reduced form in a previous study [3]. Recombinant hBD-1 and its mutants were used in its linearized form for bactericidal testing, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy as well as generation of specific polyclonal antibodies. Here we present a step-by-step protocol, with minor modifications, which might be applied also for production of other cysteine-rich and linearized antimicrobial peptides in E.coli and their specific polyclonal antibodies.
Keywords
Antimicrobial peptides, hBD-1, recombinant expression, polyclonal antibody
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The authors declare no competing financial interests
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Associated Publications
Reduction of disulphide bonds unmasks potent antimicrobial activity of human β-defensin 1
by Bjoern O. Schroeder, Zhihong Wu, Sabine Nuding, +7
Nature (30 November, 2010)
An open repository of community-contributed protocols sponsored by Nature Research.
Learn more about Protocol Exchange
Method Article
Jan Wehkamp
Wehkamp Lab, Dr. Margarete Fischer-Bosch-Institute of Clinical Pharmacology, Stuttgart
Corresponding Author
Version History
CURRENT STATUS: Posted
Version 1
Posted 20 Jan, 2011
No community comments so far
Metrics
Comments: 0
HTML Views: ...
License:
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 3.0 License. Read Full License
Antimicrobial peptides represent the first-line host defence against microbial pathogens and an essential component of innate immunity. They have received growing interest because of their potential use as therapeutic antibiotics. Due to the fact that most antimicrobial peptides are toxic to prokaryotic host cells, they are currently often produced by chemical synthesis. However, this is too costly for them to be used when large quantities of antimicrobial peptides are required for investigations and clinical trials. Thus, the convenience and cost efficiencies of bacterial production of antimicrobial peptides have become a bottleneck problem.
As an important group of antimicrobial peptides human ß-defensins are cationic peptides with 38-47 amino acid residues showing three strands of anti-parallel β-sheets that provide a compact small structure [1,2]. We describe an optimized strategy for recombinant expression of hBD-1 and its mutants in Escherichia coli, to efficiently produce milligram quantities of pure oxidized and correctly folded hBD-1, which was converted into its fully reduced form in a previous study [3]. Recombinant hBD-1 and its mutants were used in its linearized form for bactericidal testing, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy as well as generation of specific polyclonal antibodies. Here we present a step-by-step protocol, with minor modifications, which might be applied also for production of other cysteine-rich and linearized antimicrobial peptides in E.coli and their specific polyclonal antibodies.
Figure 1
Figure 2
The authors declare no competing financial interests
Loading...
Associated Publications
Reduction of disulphide bonds unmasks potent antimicrobial activity of human β-defensin 1
by Bjoern O. Schroeder, Zhihong Wu, Sabine Nuding, +7
Nature (30 November, 2010)