Enhanced secretion of human granulocyte colony-stimulating factor directed by a novel hybrid fusion peptide from recombinant Saccharomyces cerevisiae at high cell concentration

The synthesis and secretion of recombinant human granulocyte colony‐stimulating factor (rhG‐CSF) are investigated in fed‐batch cultures at high cell concentration of recombinant Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and some important characteristics of the secreted rhG‐CSF are demonstrated. Transcription of the recombinant gene is regulated by a GAL1–10 upstream activating sequence (UASG), and the rhG‐CSF is expressed in a hybrid fusion protein consisting of signal sequence of Kluyveromyces lactis killer toxin and N‐terminal 24 amino acids of human interleukin 1β. The intracellular KEX2 cleavage leads to excretion of mature rhG‐CSF into extracellular culture broth, and the cleavage process seems to be highly efficient. In spite of relatively low copy number the plasmid propagation is stably maintained even at nonselective culture conditions. The rhG‐CSF synthesis does not depend on galactose level, whereas the production of extracellular rhG‐CSF was significantly enhanced by increasing the inducer concentration above a certain level and also by supplementing the nonionic surfactant to the culture medium, which is notably due to the enhanced secretion efficiency. Various immunoblotting analyses demonstrate that none of the rhG‐CSF is accumulated in the cell wall fraction and that a significant amount of intracellular rhG‐CSF antibody‐specific immunoreactive proteins is located in the ER. A core N‐glycosylation at fused IL‐1β fragment is likely to play a critical role in directing the high‐level secretion of rhG‐CSF, and the O‐glycosylation of secreted rhG‐CSF seems nearly negligible. Also the extracellular rhG‐CSF is observed to exist as various multimers, and the nature of molecular interaction is evidently not the covalent disulfide bridges. The CD spectra of purified rhG‐CSF and Escherichia coli‐derived standard show that the conformations of both are similar and are almost identical to that reported for natural hG‐CSF. ©1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Biotechnol Bioeng 57: 600‐609, 1998.