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BioMed Research International
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 720285, 6 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/720285
Construction, Expression, and Characterization of Thymosin Alpha 1 Tandem Repeats in Escherichia coli
State Key Laboratory of Cancer Biology, Department of Biopharmaceutics, School of Pharmacy, Fourth Military Medical University, Xi'an 710032, China
Received 11 June 2012; Revised 26 November 2012; Accepted 26 November 2012
Academic Editor: Fabio Ferreira Perazzo
Copyright © 2013 Xiao-Chang Xue et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Thymosin alpha 1 (Tα1), which is composed of 28 amino acids, has been commercialized worldwide for its immune-modulatory and antitumor effects. Tα1 can stimulate T cell proliferation and differentiation from bone marrow stem cells, augment cell-mediated immune responses, and regulate homeostasis of immune system. In this study, we developed a novel strategy to produce Tα1 concatemer (Tα1) in Escherichia coli and compared its activity with chemically synthesized Tα1. Results showed that Tα1 can more effectively stimulate T cell proliferation and significantly upregulate IL-2 receptor expression. We concluded that the expression system for Tα1 concatemer was constructed successfully, which could serve as an efficient tool for the production of large quantities of the active protein.