HIGH-LEVEL EXPRESSION OF EUKARYOTIC POLYPEPTIDES FROM BACTERIAL CHROMOSOMES

Attractive economics and short development timelines have often been c ited as reasons for using bacteria to express eukaryotic proteins on a commercial scale. Nevertheless, routine techniques for bacterial expr ession of heterologous proteins are beset by a variety of technical an d legal difficulties. In particular, the use of plasmids to express fo reign proteins, popular promoter systems, protein fusion partners, and histidine tags and the recovery of proteins from inclusion bodies are affected by a host of issued patents. Chromosomally encoded leaderles s fusions (CELF) offer a variety of technical and legal advantages ove r existing bacterial expression systems. In this study, we show that C ELF can be used to produce a wide assortment of eukaryotic proteins at 10-liter fermentation scale. (C) 1998 Academic Press.