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Protein folding and conformational stress in microbial cells producing recombinant proteins: a host comparative overview

Brigitte Gasser1 email, Markku Saloheimo2 email, Ursula Rinas3 email, Martin Dragosits1 email, Escarlata Rodríguez-Carmona4 email, Kristin Baumann5 email, Maria Giuliani6 email, Ermenegilda Parrilli6 email, Paola Branduardi7 email, Christine Lang8 email, Danilo Porro7 email, Pau Ferrer5 email, Maria Luisa Tutino6 email, Diethard Mattanovich1 email and Antonio Villaverde4 email

University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences Vienna, Department of Biotechnology, Vienna, Austria

VTT Technical Research Centre, Espoo, Finland

Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, Braunschweig, Germany

Autonomous University of Barcelona, Institute for Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Department of Genetics and Microbiology, and CIBER-BBN Network in Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine, Barcelona, Spain

Autonomous University of Barcelona, Department of Chemical Engineering, Barcelona, Spain

University of Naples Federico II, School of Biotechnological Sciences, Naples, Italy

University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Biotechnology and Bioscience, Milan, Italy

Technical University Berlin, Faculty III, Institute for Microbiology and Genetics, Berlin, Germany

author email corresponding author email

Microbial Cell Factories 2008, 7:11doi:10.1186/1475-2859-7-11

Published: 4 April 2008

Abstract

Different species of microorganisms including yeasts, filamentous fungi and bacteria have been used in the past 25 years for the controlled production of foreign proteins of scientific, pharmacological or industrial interest. A major obstacle for protein production processes and a limit to overall success has been the abundance of misfolded polypeptides, which fail to reach their native conformation. The presence of misfolded or folding-reluctant protein species causes considerable stress in host cells. The characterization of such adverse conditions and the elicited cell responses have permitted to better understand the physiology and molecular biology of conformational stress. Therefore, microbial cell factories for recombinant protein production are depicted here as a source of knowledge that has considerably helped to picture the extremely rich landscape of in vivo protein folding, and the main cellular players of this complex process are described for the most important cell factories used for biotechnological purposes.


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