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Infect. Immun., Jan 1995, 301-308, Vol 63, No. 1
Copyright © 1995, American Society for Microbiology

Expression and purification of Shiga-like toxin II B subunits

DW Acheson, SA De Breucker, M Jacewicz, LL Lincicome, A Donohue-Rolfe, AV Kane and GT Keusch
Division of Geographic Medicine and Infectious Diseases, New England Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts 02111.

Shiga-like toxins (SLTs), which are produced by certain strains of Escherichia coli, are composed of enzymatically active A and B subunit multimers responsible for the toxin's binding. We have previously purified large amounts of the SLT-I B subunit by using a hyperexpression vector in Vibrio cholerae under the control of the trc promoter. In this study we examined various expression vectors to maximize yields of the SLT-II B subunit. The SLT-II B subunit has been expressed by using both the T7 promoter and the tac promoter in E. coli. When expressed from a plasmid containing the structural gene for SLT-II B deleted of the leader sequence, SLT-II B was able to form multimers when cross-linked, although SLT-II B production from this plasmid was unreproducible. SLT-II B expressed in all three systems appeared to form unstable multimers, which did not readily bind to a monoclonal antibody which preferentially recognizes B subunit multimers. SLT-II B expression was not increased by moving any of the plasmids into V. cholerae. Polyclonal antibodies raised to SLT-II B in rabbits recognized B subunit in SLT-II holotoxin yet were poorly neutralizing. SLT-II B was also expressed as a fusion protein with maltose-binding protein and could be cleaved from maltose-binding protein with factor Xa. Although the expression vectors were able to make large amounts of SLT-II B, as determined by Western blotting (immunoblotting), the levels of purified SLT-II B subunit were low compared with those obtained previously for SLT-I B subunit, probably because of instability of the multimeric SLT-II B subunit.

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