• Journal of Life Science
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.275-283
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• 2018

Human fibroblast growth factor (FGF) has the potential to be a commercially important therapeutic or cosmeceutical agent due to its ability to generate tissue and heal wounds. Granting permeability into skin tissues increases the therapeutic effects of FGF. Thus, several researchers have attempted the fusion of FGF conjugates with protein transduction domains (PTDs) to investigate the transduction ability and therapeutic effects of FGF. Less is known, however, about whether the location of PTD fused to the N- or C-terminus of FGF proteins has a significant impact on the folding and stability in Escherichia coli, and eventually, on transduction. Here, we report cloning of human basic fibroblast growth factor (FGF2) as a control and FGF2 with PTD fused to the N- or C-terminal ends of FGF proteins by an overlap extension PCR. We performed expression, verified expression properties of recombinant FGF2 without or with PTD fused to the N-terminus and the C-terminus, and investigated transduction ability into tissue by treating the dorsal skin of mice subjects. As a result, FGF2 and FGF2-PTD (fused to C-terminus) fusion protein were expressed as soluble forms suitable for straight-forward purification, unlike insoluble PTD-FGF2 (fused to N-terminus), but only FGF2-PTD fusion protein could transduce into the dorsal skin tissue of the mice subjects. Our results suggest that FGF2 with PTD fused to the C-terminus is more efficient than other options in terms of expression, purification, and delivery into skin tissue, as it does not require labor-intensive, costly, and time-consuming methods.