Expression and Secretion of a Functional Scorpion Insecticidal Toxin in Cultured Mouse Cells

Abstract

We have expressed a synthetic gene encoding the insecticidal neurotoxin of scorpion Androctonus australis (AaIT) in NIH/3T3 mouse fibroblast cells under the transcriptional control of a murine retroviral long terminal repeat. The secretion of the toxin into the culture medium was directed by the signal peptide of human interleukin-2. The recombinant AaIT produced was selectively toxic to yellow-fever mosquito larvae and harmless to mice.

A Recombinant Insect‐Specific α‐Toxin of Buthus occitanus tunetanus Scorpion Confers Protection Against Homologous Mammal Toxins

“…The present attempt was therefore interesting because several other systems failed to generate satisfactory levels of active recombinant scorpion toxins. Expression of scorpion toxins in cos-7 cells (Bougis et al, 1989), in insect cells by means of baculovirus system (Carbonell et al, 1988), in plants (Pang et al, 1992), in NIH/3T3 mouse cells (Dee et al, 1990) and in yeast (Pang et al, 1992;MartinEauclaire et al, 1994) led to rather low yields. Recently, Zilberberg et al (1995) described the expression in bacteria of a cDNA that encoded an a anti-insect neurotoxin (LqhaIT).…”

Polyclonal Antibody Against a Recombinant Chlorotoxin-like Peptide from the Chinese Scorpion and Detection of its Putative Receptors in Human Glioma Cells

“…A lot of toxin was needed in this step. Many attempts at the expression of scorpion neurotoxins in various systems have been reported, including those of E. coli (Zilberberg et al 1996;Pang et al 1992), yeast (Zilberberg et al 1996;Feng et al 1999;MartinEauclaire et al 1994), insect cells, and mammalian cells (Bougis et al 1989;Carbonell et al 1998;Dee et al 1990). Recently we expressed the gene encoding BmK Mm2 using the pExSecI expression system and got the fusion product ZZBmK Mm2 at a level of 1.6 mg l -1 (Fu et al 2004).…”

Expression and Purification of the BmK M1 Neurotoxin from the Scorpion Buthus martensii Karsch

“…Since 1989, there have been many reports about the expression of scorpion neurotoxins in various systems, including those of Escherichia coli (22,23), yeast (23,24), insect cells, and mammalian cells (25)(26)(27)(28)(29). Unfortunately, most of them were not very successful because of either the low level of production or the production of a nonfunctional protein.…”