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The State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology, Marine Biotechnology Research Center, Shandong University, Jinan 250100, China
Correspondence
Yuzhong Zhang
zhangyz{at}sdu.edu.cn
| ABSTRACT |
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The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession no. for the nucleotide sequence data reported in this study is DQ371965.
Supplementary data is available with the online version of this paper.
| INTRODUCTION |
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Subtilases occur in archaea, bacteria, viruses, fungi, yeasts and higher eukaryotes. In bacteria, archaea and fungi, most of the subtilases are secreted and are probably involved in nutrition. Some subtilases have been applied in biotechnology. For example, subtilisin and proteinase K are used as reagents to make peptides from proteins, and subtilisin is an active agent in biological washing powders (Rawlings et al., 2006
). With the discovery and characterization of novel kinds of subtilase, further applications in biotechnology may be found.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in cold-adapted enzymes, both as models in studies of thermal stability and the molecular adaptation of proteins, and as potential candidates for biotechnological applications (Georlette et al., 2004
). To date, most of the psychrophilic proteases studied have been from bacteria isolated from Arctic and Antarctic locations. In contrast, psychrophiles and psychrophilic enzymes reported from deep-sea strains are poorly represented, probably because of the difficulties of sample collection and micro-organism cultivation. The deep sea (except near hydrothermal vents) is permanently cold, and many kinds of psychrophilic micro-organism live there. In addition to low temperature, deep-sea environments are characterized by high pressure, and high salt and low nutrient concentrations. Psychrophilic micro-organisms surviving under these extreme conditions must have a complex suite of morphological, physiological and metabolic adaptations. Accordingly, there is a greater chance of finding novel enzymes with unusual characteristics in deep-sea psychrophiles, and they may have special applications in biotechnology.
We isolated a cold-adapted bacterium Pseudoalteromonas sp. SM9913 from a deep-sea sediment at 1855 m depth that was shown to secrete proteases. The serine protease MCP-01 is the main protease secreted by this strain (Chen et al., 2003a
). This enzyme has been developed into a novel flavorzyme to improve the flavour of refrigerated meat (He et al., 2004
). In this article, the cloning, sequencing and analysis of the gene encoding protease MCP-01, as well as the evolutionary relationships among subtilase members, are described. The structure and biochemical properties of the purified MCP-01 were also studied. The results showed that MCP-01 is a novel type of subtilase with cold-adapted characteristics, termed a deseasin, belonging to subfamily S8A.
| METHODS |
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was grown at 37 °C on Luria–Bertani medium supplemented with ampicillin for the selection of transformants. Plasmid pGEM-T vector (Promega) was used for cloning and sequencing.
Purification of MCP-01.
Protease MCP-01 produced by Pseudoalteromonas sp. SM9913 was purified from its culture supernatant by the procedure previously described (Chen et al., 2003a
). Briefly, the culture supernatant was precipitated by adding 55 % solid ammonium sulfate powder. The precipitate was dissolved in 50 mM Tris/HCl buffer (pH 8.5) and dialysed against the same buffer. Then it was concentrated by PEG 20 000. The concentrated sample was then put on a column of Sephadex G100 which was eluted with 50 mM Tris/HCl buffer (pH 8.5) at a rate of 8 ml h–1. The eluate was collected in 3 ml fractions. The purity of MCP-01 in each fraction was monitored by capillary electrophoresis, as described previously (Chen et al., 2003b
). The fractions without any peak representing an impurity, as shown in Supplementary Fig. S1, were collected for use. All procedures were performed at 0–5 °C.
N-terminal amino acid sequence analysis of MCP-01 and its autolytic peptides.
Since MCP-01 is susceptible to autolysis (Chen et al., 2002
, 2003b
), the purified MCP-01 was incubated at 35 °C for 2 h to allow autolysis to take place. Then, MCP-01 and its autolytic peptides were separated by SDS-PAGE by the method of Laemmli (1970)
and transferred to Sequi-Blot PVDF membranes (Bio-Rad). N-terminal amino acid sequences of MCP-01 and the protein bands of its autolytic peptides were analysed by Edman degradation employing the Procise CLC sequencer (Applied Biosystems) at Shanghai GeneCore BioTechnologies.
Cloning of gene mcp01 encoding protease MCP-01.
Genomic DNA of Pseudoalteromonas sp. SM9913 was extracted by the NaCl/cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) method (Murray & Thompson, 1980
). Based on the N-terminal amino acid sequences of MCP-01 (SATNDPRF) and one autolytic peptide (AVDNDQNP), two primers were designed and synthesized. With the genomic DNA of Pseudoalteromonas sp. SM9913 as template, PCR amplification was performed by Taq DNA polymerase for 30 cycles consisting of 94 °C for 30 s, 50 °C for 1 min and 72 °C for 2 min, and a 620 bp product was amplified. Its sequence was determined by Shanghai Invitrogen Biotechnology. Three specific primers were designed based on its 5' terminal sequence, three based on its 3' terminal sequence, and two general primers were designed containing the protein initiation codon and the stop codon, respectively. Then, chromosome walking was used to amplify the neighbouring sequence of the 620 bp product by thermal asymmetric interlaced (TAIL) PCR (Liu & Whittier, 1995
). In this way, a 494 bp upstream sequence and a 713 bp downstream sequence of the 620 bp product were amplified from the genomic DNA of Pseudoalteromonas sp. SM9913 and sequenced. Then, an 1827 bp sequence predicted to contain the ATG start codon of gene mcp01 was assembled. Based on the 3' terminal sequence of this 1827 bp fragment, new specific primers were designed and its neighbouring sequence was amplified by TAIL PCR from the genomic DNA. Then, an 849 bp downstream sequence of the 1827 bp fragment was amplified and sequenced. Through assembly, a 2676 bp sequence containing a 2508 bp ORF that encodes gene mcp01 was obtained. Two primers were designed based on the 5' and 3' terminal sequences of this ORF, and then gene mcp01 was amplified from the genomic DNA of Pseudoalteromonas sp. SM9913 by PCR and sequenced. Its sequence was verified to correspond to that amplified by TAIL PCR.
Activity assay of protease MCP-01.
The enzyme activity towards casein was determined as previously described (Chen et al., 2003a
). Proteolytic activity with BSA or gelatin as the substrate was determined in 50 mM Tris/HCl buffer (pH 8.0) by the same method. Proteolytic activities towards synthetic substrates were determined in 50 mM Tris/HCl buffer (pH 9.0) by Peek's method (Peek et al., 1993
). One unit of enzyme activity was defined as the amount of enzyme that catalysed the formation of one micromole of p-nitroaniline per minute.
Characterization of MCP-01.
The optimum pH was determined using the method previously reported (Chen et al., 2003a
). The temperature optimum was determined by monitoring activity over 10 min at optimum pH between 0 and 40 °C. The kinetic parameters of MCP-01 were determined at 5 and 20 °C by Lineweaver–Burk plots which were made by linear regression with initial rates determined between 0 and 1 mg ml–1 N-succinyl-Ala-Ala-Pro-Leu-p-nitroanilide (AAPL). The activation energy (Ea) of the enzymic reaction was calculated by measuring the slope of the Arrhenius plot, which was made based on the kcat values at 0–20 °C, employing the equation:
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G#=
H#–T
S#;
H#=Ea–RT; and
S#=2.303R(logkcat–10.753–logT+Ea/2.303RT) (Kulakova et al., 1999
Activity assay and characterization of subtilisin Carlsberg.
Purified subtilisin Carlsberg (type III, lyophilized powder) was purchased from Sigma. As reported by the manufacturer, it had been purified by crystallization. We did not detect any other protein fragment by electrophoresis. A 1 mg ml–1 solution of subtilisin Carlsberg was prepared in 50 mM Tris/HCl buffer (pH 10.0). The enzyme was diluted in the same buffer for characterization experiments. The temperature optimum was determined by monitoring activity from 0 to 70 °C at pH 10.0 with 1 mg AAPL ml–1 as substrate and the enzyme concentration used was 0.1 µg ml–1 at 0–30 °C and 0.05 µg ml–1 at 30–70 °C. Kinetic parameters of subtilisin Carlsberg were determined at 5 and 20 °C by Lineweaver–Burk plots which were made by linear regression with initial rates determined between 0 and 1 mg AAPL ml–1 and the enzyme concentration used was 0.1 µg ml–1. Ea,
G#,
H# and
S# were determined by the same methods and equations used for MCP-01.
Analytical procedures.
The protein concentration of MCP-01 was determined by the Bradford method with BSA as standard (Bradford, 1976
). The isoelectric point of MCP-01 was determined by the method of Huang & Forsberg (1987)
. The molecular mass of the purified MCP-01 was determined by MALDI-TOF MS (Voyager DE Pro, Applied Biosystems) at Shanghai GeneCore BioTechnologies.
Domain architecture analysis and phylogenetic analysis.
To search for sequences similar to MCP-01, the non-redundant databases at the NCBI (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) and the MEROPS database (release 7.60) (Rawlings et al., 2006
) were searched using the BLAST service available at the respective websites with default parameters. Then, the domain architectures of the obtained sequences were analysed with the CD-search service (Marchler-Bauer et al., 2005
) available at NCBI (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/cdd/cdd.shtml). Database CDD version 2.10 [with 12 589 position-specific scoring matrices (PSSMs)] and default parameters were used. The representative sequences were aligned with CLUSTAL X 1.83 (Thompson et al., 1997
) using the PAM matrix (Dayhoff et al., 1978
). The resulting alignment was manually modified with the aid of BioEdit (Hall, 1999
). Positions containing alignment gaps were removed before phylogenetic analyses to get a more reliable tree. The catalytic domain portion of the final alignment was used to construct a neighbour-joining consensus tree using MEGA 3.1 (Kumar et al., 2004
). A PAM model and 1000 bootstrap replicates were used. Multiple independent analysis runs were performed with different seed numbers. The results showed that the seed number did not affect the topology of subtrees whose bootstrap support was greater than 40 %. Detailed information relating to the sequences used for constructing evolutionary trees is shown in Supplementary Table S1.
| RESULTS |
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Structural analysis of mature MCP-01
The mature deseasin MCP-01 enzyme was purified from the culture of Pseudoalteromonas sp. SM9913 and its purity was monitored by capillary electrophoresis (Supplementary Fig. S1). Its N-terminal sequence and molecular mass were analysed. The N-terminal sequence of the mature enzyme was SATNDP, showing that the signal peptide and the subtilisin_N domain are cleaved when the enzyme is secreted outside the cell. The molecular mass of the mature enzyme measured by MALDI-TOF MS was 65.84 kDa (Supplementary Fig. S2). Based on its molecular mass and N-terminal sequence, it was predicted that mature MCP-01 contained 639 amino acid residues from S1 to E639, which indicates that the C-terminal sequence is also cleaved off at a predicted site between E639 and L640 during the maturation of the enzyme. Therefore, the mature deseasin MCP-01 is a multidomain protein composed of a catalytic region, a linker, a P_proprotein domain and a PKD domain. The P_proprotein domain, also termed P domain, is a region of eukaryotic subtilisin-like proprotein convertases located immediately downstream of the catalytic domain (Gluschankof & Fuller, 1994
). The PKD domain, which was first identified in human polycystin-1 (The International Polycystic Kidney Disease Consortium, 1995
), has been found in bacterial collagenases (Matsushita et al., 1999
), proteases (Oda et al., 1996
; Miyamoto et al., 2002
), cellulases (Ahsan et al., 1996
) and chitinases (Perrakis et al., 1994
; Orikoshi et al., 2005
).
We tried to construct a homologous model of deseasin MCP-01. Because the subtilase structures in the database are all monodomains, a homologous model of intact deseasin MCP-01 could not be constructed. However, based on the structure of the thermostable protease from Bacillus strain Ak.1 (Smith et al., 1999
), the catalytic domain of deseasin MCP-01 was modelled by CPHmodels 2.0 Server (http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/services/CPHmodels/) (Lund et al., 2002
) (Fig. 2a
). All the typical structural characteristics of S8 subtilases could be found in the model of the catalytic domain of MCP-01, such as the seven-stranded parallel beta-sheets and the catalytic triad of Asp, His and Ser. However, two inserts between the Asp and His residues of the catalytic triad of MCP-01 were found when compared to that of some typical subtilases, such as subtilisin Carlsberg, thermitase, protease K and Kexin (Fig. 3
). The positions of the inserts in the model of the catalytic domain of MCP-01 are shown in Fig. 2(a)
. They are in two loops at the surface of the catalytic domain and make the corresponding loops longer. In addition, a homologous model of the PKD domain of MCP-01 was also constructed with 1R64.pdb as the template (Fig. 2b
). Like the structures of other PKD domains (Miyamoto et al., 2002
), it has a beta-sandwich fold containing five parallel beta-sheets.
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H#) and entropy (
S#) in catalytic reactions than their mesophilic analogues, because of their more flexible structure (Feller, 2003
H# and
S# during catalysis than mesophilic subtilisin Carlsberg (Table 3
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| DISCUSSION |
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Most mature subtilases in subfamily S8A are monodomain enzymes (Rawlings & Barrett, 2004
). The mature enzyme of deseasin MCP-01 is a structurally novel multidomain subtilase containing a catalytic domain, a linker, a P_proprotein domain and a PKD domain. Only one other subtilase with a PKD domain has been reported before (Miyamoto et al., 2002
). It is a chitin-binding protease with a chitin-binding domain at its C terminus. The structure of this subtilase is obviously different from that of MCP-01 in that its PKD domain is located between its catalytic domain and its chitin-binding domain. Although a PKD domain has been found in many enzymes, its function has rarely been studied. The PKD domain in chitinase A from the marine bacterium Alteromonas sp. strain O-7 has been demonstrated to have binding activity to powdered chitin (Orikoshi et al., 2005
). No function for the PKD domain of proteases during catalysis has been shown experimentally. The fact that the PKD domain of MCP-01 still remains in the mature enzyme suggests that it must have a function during MCP-01 catalysis. We are now studying the function of the PKD domain of MCP-01 during catalysis.
Most subtilases in subfamily S8A are non-specific peptidases with a preference for an aromatic amino acid residue at the P1 position (Siezen & Leunissen, 1997
; Grøn et al., 1992
; Kulakova et al., 1999
). The substrate specificity of deseasin MCP-01 to AAPF and AAPL differed from that of three other subtilisins, Carlsberg (this study), Ak.1 (Toogood et al., 2000
) and SapSh (Kulakova et al., 1999
). The most striking difference, however, was the activity of deseasin MCP-01 towards the synthetic substrate FVR. Subtilases in subfamily S8A have not been widely tested with synthetic substrates with basic residues at the P1 position. However, the lack of activity of subtilisin Carlsberg towards FVR suggests that cleavage after basic residues may be a distinctive aspect of deseasins that warrants further investigation.
Cold-adapted enzymes have a high flexibility that results in their high activity at low temperatures and concomitantly a decreased stability (Siddiqui & Cavicchioli, 2006
; Feller, 2003
). Through a model of the structure of the catalytic domain of deseasin MCP-01, many structural characteristics typical of cold-adapted proteins could be seen. Besides the primary structural characteristics shown in Table 2
, there are two inserts in the catalytic domain of MCP-01 when its sequence and structure are compared with that of mesophilic subtilases. Since, when compared with mesophilic and thermophilic homologues, cold-adapted enzymes usually have more, or longer, loops connecting alpha-helices and beta-sheets, and longer surface loops increase the possible amplitude of the movement between secondary structures and may decrease enzyme stability (Siddiqui & Cavicchioli, 2006
), the two inserts in the catalytic domain of MCP-01, which make the corresponding loops longer, probably increase the local flexibility around the active site of MCP-01; this needs to be verified by further investigation. Furthermore, comparisons of catalytic properties with those of subtilisin Carlsberg provided strong evidence of low-temperature adaptation in deseasin MCP-01. The optimum temperature for deseasin MCP-01 was low. This is a typical feature of cold-adapted (as opposed to cold-active) enzymes and reflects their greater flexibility, making them prone to unfolding and inactivation at only moderate temperatures (Feller, 2003
). In addition, the percentage of maximal activity at 0 °C for deseasin MCP-01 was much greater (45.2 %) than that of subtilisin Carlsberg (4.8 %). The kcat/Km value of MCP-01 at 5 °C was higher than that at 20 °C. These data show that deseasin MCP-01 has higher catalytic efficiency at low temperature. Although cold-adapted enzymes frequently have higher catalytic efficiency than their mesophilic counterparts, this is not a universal feature. Our data show that subtilisin Carlsberg had higher efficiency, despite the cold adaptation of deseasin MCP-01. Despite the fact that subtilisin Carlsberg and deseasin MCP-01 both belong to subfamily S8A, their structures are obviously different, which may explain this difference in catalytic efficiency. Alternatively, subtilisin Carlsberg, purified by crystallization, may have much higher purity than deseasin MCP-01, which was purified by gel-filtration chromatography. Besides a low optimum temperature and high kcat/Km at low temperature, deseasin MCP-01 shows lower Ea,
H# and
S# during catalysis than subtilisin Carlsberg. The deep-sea environment in which strain Pseudoalteromonas sp. SM9913 is presumed to exist has a temperature permanently around 4 °C. To enable the strain to utilize the surrounding protein efficiently for its survival, deseasin MCP-01, the main protease secreted by this strain, must have a high catalytic efficiency in the cold environment. The results of this study show that MCP-01 is structurally and kinetically adapted to low temperatures.
| ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS |
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Edited by: A. Holmes
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Received 14 January 2007;
revised 11 March 2007;
accepted 12 March 2007.
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