Analysis of 11,430 recombinant protein production experiments reveals that protein yield is tunable by synonymous codon changes of translation initiation sites

Autor: Paul P. Gardner, Augustine Chen, Craig J. van Dolleweerd, Chun Shen Lim, Daniela M. Remus, Bikash K. Bhandari
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Proteomics
Protein Expression
Codon
Initiator

Gene Expression
medicine.disease_cause
Biochemistry
law.invention
law
Protein biosynthesis
Biology (General)
Free Energy
Ecology
Nucleotides
Messenger RNA
Physics
Recombinant Proteins
Nucleic acids
Computational Theory and Mathematics
Modeling and Simulation
Physical Sciences
Recombinant protein production
Codon
Terminator

Recombinant DNA
Thermodynamics
Research Article
Optimization
QH301-705.5
Computational biology
Biology
Research and Analysis Methods
Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Eukaryotic translation
Gene Expression and Vector Techniques
Genetics
medicine
Molecular Biology Techniques
Molecular Biology
Escherichia coli
Silent Mutation
Ecology
Evolution
Behavior and Systematics

Translation Initiation
Molecular Biology Assays and Analysis Techniques
Cell growth
Computational Biology
Biology and Life Sciences
Proteins
Yield (chemistry)
RNA
Protein Translation
Mathematics
Protein Abundance
Zdroj: PLoS Computational Biology, Vol 17, Iss 10, p e1009461 (2021)
PLoS Computational Biology
ISSN: 1553-7358
Popis: Recombinant protein production is a key process in generating proteins of interest in the pharmaceutical industry and biomedical research. However, about 50% of recombinant proteins fail to be expressed in a variety of host cells. Here we show that the accessibility of translation initiation sites modelled using the mRNA base-unpairing across the Boltzmann’s ensemble significantly outperforms alternative features. This approach accurately predicts the successes or failures of expression experiments, which utilised Escherichia coli cells to express 11,430 recombinant proteins from over 189 diverse species. On this basis, we develop TIsigner that uses simulated annealing to modify up to the first nine codons of mRNAs with synonymous substitutions. We show that accessibility captures the key propensity beyond the target region (initiation sites in this case), as a modest number of synonymous changes is sufficient to tune the recombinant protein expression levels. We build a stochastic simulation model and show that higher accessibility leads to higher protein production and slower cell growth, supporting the idea of protein cost, where cell growth is constrained by protein circuits during overexpression.
Author summary Recombinant proteins are widely used as therapeutics, such as vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, hormones and enzymes. However, the success rate of recombinant protein production is about 50%. To address this problem, we propose optimising the unpairing propensities of nucleotides around translation initiation sites using a thermodynamic quantity called mRNA accessibility. Our study shows that this method is generalisable across prokaryotic and eukaryotic expression hosts. Importantly, we validated this method using laboratory experiments and computational modelling. Furthermore, we propose a low cost technique to tune protein expression by engineering minimal changes to genes of interest through our web application (https://tisigner.com/tisigner).
Databáze: OpenAIRE