BackgroundThe non-pathogenic bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis is widely used as a near-native expression host for the purification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteins. Unfortunately, the Hsp60 chaperone GroEL1, which is relatively highly expressed, is often co-purified with polyhistidine-tagged recombinant proteins as a major contaminant when using this expression system. This is likely due to a histidine-rich C-terminus in GroEL1.ResultsIn order to improve purification efficiency and yield of polyhistidine-tagged mycobacterial target proteins, we created a mutant version of GroEL1 by removing the coding sequence for the histidine-rich C-terminus, termed GroEL1ΔC. GroEL1ΔC, which is a functional protein, is no longer able to bind nickel affinity beads. Using a selection of challenging test proteins, we show that GroEL1ΔC is no longer present in protein samples purified from the groEL1ΔC expression strain and demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of purifying and characterising proteins produced using this strain.ConclusionsThis novel Mycobacterium smegmatis expression strain allows efficient expression and purification of mycobacterial proteins while concomitantly removing the troublesome contaminant GroEL1 and consequently increasing the speed and efficiency of protein purification.

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Mycobacteria have an unusual redundancy of six putative carboxyltransferase genes that form high-molecular weight holo acyl coenzyme A carboxylase complexes with a complementary set of three biotin carboxylase genes. Most of these enzyme complexes use small fatty acid coenzyme A esters as substrate, to allow their extension by one methylene group via a carboxybiotin-mediated α-carboxylation reaction. Redundant occurrence of these complexes was assumed to be related to highly complex enzymatic requirements in lipid biosynthesis, as the mycobacterial thick cell wall comprises unusual very long chain fatty acids, including mycolic acid. We have solved two high-resolution crystal structures of the 350 kDa hexameric assemblies of two different acyl coenzyme A carboxylase hexameric assemblies, AccD5 and AccD6 [1; Anandhakrishnan et al., unpublished], and characterized these enzyme complexes functionally. In a second step we investigated the acyl coenzyme A carboxylase complex AccD1-AccA1 from Mycobacteria tuberculosis with hitherto unknown function. By using a metabolomics approach we found that AccD1-AccA1 is involved in branched amino acid catabolism, which was not investigated in mycobacteria before [Ehebauer et al, unpublished. Using an in vitro assay, we show that the enzyme complex uses methylcrotonyl coenzyme A as substrate]. We determined the overall architecture of the 700 kDa AccD1-AccA1 complex to be formed from three layers of a central AccD1 hexameric ring, flanked by two distal tiers composed of three AccA1 subunits each. Our electron microscopy data match the overall dimensions of a methylcrotonyl coenzyme A holo complex with known structure and thus support our functional findings. Our data suggest a unique functional role of the AccD1-AccA1 complex within the Mycobacterium tuberculosis acyl coenzyme A carboxylase interactome. Ultimately, it is our goal to solve this and related structures of ACCase holo complexes by high-resolution crystallography as well. The abstract is dedicated to Louis Delbaere with whom I shared time during my PhD at the University of Basel, Switzerland.[1] Holton et al. FEBS Lett. 2006 Dec 22;580(30):6898-902.