Abstract (eng)
Halophilic proteins and enzymes are adapted to the high salt intracellular environment. Industrial applications are of great interest in finding applications of salt-functioning proteins and enzymes. Therefore controlled expression of genes is very important for the overproduction of proteins, which enables a directed investigation of specific proteins and their functions. Strong, inducible and tightly controlled promoters are a central tool to switch on and off genes at any time to achieve controlled gene expression. In order to obtain proper folded proteins, overexpression systems have to be evolved for halophilic Archaea. In 2011, for Nab. magadii the tryptophan inducible promoter of the tryptophanase gene (tnaA) was established, called ptnaN (68). This promoter shows nearly no basal activity and can be simply turned on by adding tryptophan to the culture medium.
The first part of this thesis focuses on the analysis of the promoter region. Due to the fact that there are multiple possible promoter sequences upstream of the tnaA gene, it was important to determine, whether they are active in combination or when they are separated. A combination of interesting sites of the upstream region of the tnaA gene was cloned as transcriptional fusions with the bgaH gene and transformed into Nab. magadii L13, in order to analyze the promoter strength of the particular sequences. Therefore the individual fragments were investigated with respect to growth-phase-dependent expression of the bgaH gene in Nab. magadii L13 cells. All truncated fragments showed no promoter activity. It seems that the tryptophanase promoter of Nab. magadii requires the entire upstream region of the tnaA gene for its activity.
The second part of this work deals with the attempt to use ptnaN for homologous gene expression in Nab. magadii. Therefore Nab. magadii L13 and the tryptophanase deletion mutant Nab. magadii L13ΔtnaA were transformed with different plasmids harboring His-tagged ORF34 and ORF36 of фCh1. Only expression of ORF36 in Nab. magadii L13 was detectable via western blotting, but the signal was very weak. All other strains showed no western blot signal may be due to an insufficient histidine concentration in the medium. In order to achieve specific gene expression with tryptophan, all strains were grown in mineral medium NMMb+, which is without tryptophan. Due to the fact, that Nab. magadii growth proteolytically, it is possible that histidine is used for growth instead of tagging any protein. To overcome this problem, the whole expression experiment was repeated, by using mineral medium with different histidine concentrations, to facilitate the growth and to obtain better results at the expression level. Again, only expression of ORF36 in Nab. magadii L13 was detectable at a histidine concentration of 5mM and 10 mM. During the whole expression process, it was not possible to express gp34 or gp36 in an adequate quantity for subsequent protein purification. For this reason it was supposed, that the His-tag has a negative influence on the protein expression. Therefore ORF34 was expressed without a His-tag under control of the ferredoxin promoter pfdx, ptnaN and its own promoter. Gene expression was only achieved by using the own promoter of ORF34. Based on these results, investigations should be continued to find a suitable protein tag for subsequent protein purification, which can be used in combination with the mineral medium. And further investigations should be made to find a suitable expression system for Nab. magadii.