Improved expression of single-chain antibodies in Ustilago maydis

To produce the full repertoire of biopharmaceutical proteins, alternative expression platforms are required. Systems that enable secretion of the target protein are favored because this facilitates downstream processing. Ustilago maydis is a promising fungal model organism for future applications in protein expression. Recently, we described the exploitation of a novel unconventional secretion mechanism for the export of heterologous proteins. In this mode of secretion, the endochitinase Cts1 functions as a carrier for export with the main advantage of avoiding potentially harmful N-glycosylation. The major limitation until now was a low yield of secreted full-length protein. For optimization, we identified two bottlenecks: mRNA amount and extracellular proteolytic activity. By generating novel expression vectors harboring a strong constitutive promoter as well as eliminating harmful proteases, yields were increased significantly. A scFv antibody fragment against the cMyc epitope served as proof-of-principle and could be purified in its active, full-length form from the culture supernatant. Thus, we improved the novel expression system in U. maydis such that it can now be investigated with respect to other targets with potential applications for instance in diagnostics and medicine.