Expression of a cold-adapted fish trypsin in Pichia pastoris

Trypsin is a highly valuable protease that has many industrial and biomedical applications. The growing demand for non-animal sources of the enzyme and for trypsins with special properties has driven the interest to clone and express this protease in microorganisms. Reports about expression of recombinant trypsins show wide differences in the degree of success and are contained mainly in patent applications, which disregard the difficulties associated with the developments. Although the yeast Pichia pastoris appears to be the microbial host with the greatest potential for the production of trypsin, it has shown problems when expressing cold-adapted fish trypsins (CAFTs). CAFTs are considered of immense value for their comparative advantage over other trypsins in a number of food-processing and biotechnological applications. Thus, to investigate potential obstacles related to the production of CAFTs in P. pastoris, the cunner fish trypsin (CFT) was cloned in different Pichia expression vectors. The vectors were constructed targeting both internal and secreted expression and keeping the CFT native signal peptide. Western-blotting analysis confirmed the expression with evident differences for each construct, observing a major effect of the leader peptide sequence on the expression patterns. Immobilized nickel affinity chromatography yielded a partially purified recombinant CFT, which exhibited trypsin-specific activity after activation with bovine enterokinase.