A HIGH-LEVEL PROKARYOTIC EXPRESSION SYSTEM - SYNTHESIS OF HUMAN INTERLEUKIN-1-ALPHA AND ITS RECEPTOR ANTAGONIST

Synthetic intronless genes, coding for human interleukin 1 alpha (IL1 alpha) and interleukin 1 receptor antagonist (IL1ra), have been expres sed efficiently in a specially designed prokaryotic vector, pGMCE (a p GEM1 derivative), where the target gene forms the second part of a two -cistron system. The first part of the system is a translation enhance r-containing mini-cistron, whose termination codon overlaps the start codon of the target gene. In the case of the IL1 alpha gene, the high expression level is largely due to the direct efficient translation in itiation at the second cistron, whereas with the IL1ra gene in the sam e system, the proximal translation initiation region (TIR) provides a high level of coupled expression of the target gene. Thus, pGMCE is a potentially versatile vector for direct prokaryotic expression.