• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.72-77
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• 2009

Here, we demonstrate that the overexpression of the GroELS chaperone system, which assists the folding of intracellular proteins and prevents aggregation of its biological targets, can enhance the thermotolerance of Escherichia coli strains and facilitate the production of recombinant protein under thermal stress. The overexpression of GroELS led to an about 2-fold higher growth rate of E. coli XL-1 blue than control at $45^{\circ}C$ and induced the growth of the strain even at $50^{\circ}C$, although the growth was not sustained in the second-round culture. The effect of GroELS overexpression was also effective on other E. coli strains such as JM109, $DH5{\alpha}$, and BL21. Finally, we have shown that coexpression of GroELS allows us to produce recombinant protein even at $50^{\circ}C$, a temperature at which the protein production based on E. coli is not efficient. This study indicates that the employment of the GroELS overexpression system can expand the range of environmental conditions for E. coli.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.739-747
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• 2018

The low solubility and high-cost recovery of Propionibacterium acnes polyunsaturated fatty acid isomerase (PAI) are key problems in the bioproduction of high value-added conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). To improve the solubility of recombinant PAI, six chaperone proteins were coexpressed with PAI. Introduction of GroELS proteins dramatically improved the PAI solubility from 29% to 97%, with increased activity by 57.8%. Combined expression of DnaKJ-GrpE and GroELS proteins increased the activity by 11.9%. In contrast, coexpression of DnaKJ-GrpE proteins significantly reduced the activity by 57.4%. Plasmids pTf16 harboring the tig gene and pG-Tf2 containing the tig and groEL-groES genes had no visible impact on PAI expression. The lytic protein E was then introduced into the recombinant Escherichia coli to develop a cell autolysis system. A 35% activity of total intracellular PAI was released from the cytoplasm by suspending the lysed cells in distilled water. The PAI recovery was further improved to 81% by optimizing the release conditions. The lipase from Rhizopus oryzae was also expressed in E. coli, with an extracellular activity of 110.9 U/ml. By using the free PAI and lipase as catalysts, a joint system was established for producing CLA from sunflower oil. Under the optimized conditions, the maximum titer of t-10,c-12-CLA reached 9.4 g/l. This work provides an effective and low-cost strategy to improve the solubility and recovery of the recombinant intracellular PAI for further large-scale production of CLA.