High-level production and isotope labeling of snake neurotoxins, disulfide-rich proteins.

The aim of this work was to produce and to label snake neurotoxins, disulfide-rich proteins. A mutant of a snake toxin, erabutoxin a, was used as a model. Its N-terminal part was fused to ZZ, a synthetic IgG-binding domain of protein A (B. Nilsson et al., 1987, Protein Eng. 1, 107-113), thus preventing degradation in the bacterial cytoplasm and providing a simple affinity-purification method on IgG Sepharose. A soluble fusion protein was obtained with a yield of 60 mg/L, corresponding to 20 mg/L toxin. The toxin moiety was folded on the column while the hybrid was still bound. The oxidoreducing conditions for the refolding were optimized and were found to be oxidative but with a need for reducing molecules. The concentration of the hybrid bound to the column could be increased up to 3.3 mg/ml without significantly altering the folding process. CNBr cleavage of the fusion protein followed by a purification step yielded about 2 mg of biologically active toxin mutant per gram of dry cell weight. This procedure was applied to produce 55 mg of a toxin uniformly labeled with 15N.