Pleurotus and Agrocybe hemolysins, new proteins hypothetically involved in fungal fruiting.

Novel hemolytic proteins, ostreolysin and aegerolysin, were purified from the fruiting bodies of the edible mushrooms Pleurotus ostreatus and Agrocybe aegerita. Both ostreolysin and aegerolysin have a molecular weight of about 16 kDa, have low isoelectric points of 5.0 and 4.85, are thermolabile, and hemolytic to bovine erythrocytes at nanomolar concentrations. Their activity is impaired by micromolar Hg(2+) but not by membrane lipids and serum low-density lipoproteins (LDL). The sequence of respectively 50 and 10 N-terminal amino acid residues of ostreolysin and aegerolysin has been determined and found to be highly identical with a cDNA-derived amino acid sequence of putative Aa-Pri1 protein from the mushroom A. aegerita, Asp-hemolysin from Aspergillus fumigatus, and two bacterial hemolysin-like proteins expressed during sporulation. We found that ostreolysin is expressed during formation of primordia and fruiting bodies, which is in accord with previous finding that the Aa-Pri1 gene is specifically expressed during fruiting initiation. It is suggestive that the isolated hemolysins play an important role in initial phase of fungal fruiting.