ABSTRACT
Secretion of heterologous proteins into Escherichia coli cell culture medium offers significant advantages for downstream processing over production as inclusion bodies; including cost and time savings, and reduction of endotoxin. Signal peptides play an important role in targeting proteins for translocation across the cytoplasmic membrane to the periplasmic space and release into culture medium during the secretion process. Alpha toxinH35L (ATH35L) was selected as an antigen for vaccine development against Staphylococcus aureus infections. It was successfully secreted into culture medium of E. coli by using bacterial signal peptides linked to the N-terminus of the protein. In order to improve the level of secreted ATH35L, we designed a series of novel signal peptides by swapping individual domains of modifying dsbA and pelB signal peptides and tested them in a fed-batch fermentation process. The data showed that some of the modified signal peptides improved the secretion efficiency of ATH35L compared with E. coli signal peptides from dsbA, pelB and phoA proteins. Indeed, one of the novel signal peptides improved the yield of secreted ATH35L by 3.5-fold in a fed-batch fermentation process and at the same time maintained processing at the expected site for signal peptide cleavage. Potentially, these new novel signal peptides can be used to improve the secretion efficiency of other heterologous proteins in E. coli. Furthermore, analysis of the synthetic signal peptide amino acid sequences provides some insight into the sequence features within the signal peptide that influence secretion efficiency.
ABSTRACT
Sensitive and precise serology assays are needed to measure the humoral response to antigens of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) following natural infection or vaccination. We developed and evaluated a collection of electrochemiluminescent (ECL) serology assays using four RSV antigens (F, N, Ga and Gb). To assess the merits of ECL technology, the four ECL serology assays were evaluated using a well-characterized "gold standard" panel of acute and convalescent serum samples from fifty-nine RSV-positive and thirty RSV-negative elderly subjects (≥65 years old). The combined results from the four ECL assays demonstrated good concordance to the "gold standard" diagnosis, reaching 95% diagnostic sensitivity and 100% diagnostic specificity. Additionally, a combination of ECL assays provided higher diagnostic sensitivity than a commercially available diagnostic ELISA or cell-based microneutralization assay. In summary, these data demonstrate the advantages of using ECL-based serology assays and highlight their use as a sensitive diagnostic approach to detect recent RSV infection in an elderly population.