Influence of different signal peptides and prosequences on expression and secretion of human tissue plasminogen activator in the baculovirus system

Foreign secretory pathway proteins are often produced in surprisingly low amounts in the baculovirus/insect cell expression system. One possible reason for this is that heterologous signal peptides might be inefficiently recognized by the insect cell protein translocation machinery. This idea was supported by a recent study showing that secretion of a plant protein in the baculovirus system was enhanced when its signal peptide was replaced with an insect-derived signal peptide (Tessier, D. C., Thomas, D. Y., Khouri, H. E., Laliberte, F., and Vernet, T. (1991) Gene (Amst.) 98, 177-183). We have extended these observations by measuring the effects of different signal peptide and signal peptide-prosequence combinations on baculovirus-mediated expression and secretion of human tissue plasminogen activator (t-PA). Replacement of the native prepropeptide with signal peptides from a lepidopteran insect secretory protein (cecropin B), a major baculovirus structural glycoprotein (64K), or an abundant, highly conserved lumenal protein of the rough endoplasmic reticulum (GRP78/BiP, a 78-kDa glucose-regulated protein/immunoglobulin heavy chain-binding protein), had no significant effect on t-PA expression or secretion. The same results were obtained with the signal peptide from honeybee prepromellitin, which was able to enhance secretion of plant propapain (Tessier et al., 1991 (above)). Similar results were obtained when heterologous signal peptides were combined with the native prosequence or when the intact cecropin B preprosequence was used. Translational initiation at an upstream, in-frame ATT, which could functionally inactivate any signal peptide, did not explain the low efficiency of t-PA secretion. Finally, deletion of the native signal peptide, prosequence, or both, failed to increase t-PA production. These results showed that insect-derived signal peptides and/or prosequences cannot always enhance the expression and/or secretion of foreign secretory pathway proteins in the baculovirus system. They also suggested that the inability of insect cells to recognize the processing signals in human t-PA efficiently is probably not the major factor preventing its high level production in this system.