Expression of a silkworm eclosion hormone gene in yeast.

Recombinant silkworm eclosion hormone was produced for the first time in yeast which was transformed with a shuttle plasmid containing a construct coding a signal peptide and the mature sequence of the silkworm eclosion hormone. Successfully transformed yeast processed recombinant silkworm eclosion hormone I (EH-I) and transported it to periplasm at the concentration of 60 micrograms per liter of culture. The biological activity of the purified recombinant silkworm eclosion hormone exhibited the ED50 value of 0.2 ng which is the same as that of the authentic hormone isolated from the silkworm brain.