Production of Tobacco Etch Virus Protease (TEV) Expressed in the Endotoxin-Free Bacillus subtilis and Its Application

Tobacco Etch virus (TEV) protease is one of the most common tools for removing fusion tags, but no study has shown that TEV can be expressed at high levels in the GRAS host strain Bacillus subtilis and purified for further application. In this study, the fusion protein BsLysSN-TEV C/S-His-TEV consisting of a fusion tag, N-terminal domain of a lysyl-tRNA synthetase (BsLysSN) coded by B. subtilis lysS gene, placed at the N-terminus followed by an endoprotease TEV cleavage site and then the expression of this fusion protein in the cytoplasm of B. subtilis was investigated. The SDS-PAGE and Western-blot analysis demonstrated that His-TEV was overexpressed under the induction of IPTG. This result infers that His-TEV protease showed promising activity in the B. subtilis cytoplasm by the cleavage of the fusion protein. These cleavage products could be purified using the Ni-NTA column, which effectively cleaved the purified recombinant protein substrate, which can be applied in the protein purification process to remove the fusion tag. Significantly, since both His-TEV protease and the fusion recombinant protein substrate are expressed in the endotoxin-free host strain, the tag removal and purified product should be theoretically endotoxin-free, which could be a promising approach for producing therapeutic proteins and also for other relevant biomedical applications.