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Expression and characterization of recombinant human VEGF165 in the middle silk gland of transgenic silkworms

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Abstract

Recombinant human vascular endothelial growth factor (rhVEGF) has important applications in therapeutic angiogenesis and inhibition of VEGF-mediated pathological angiogenesis. Previous studies have shown that rhVEGF can be produced in several expression systems, including Escherichia coli, yeasts, insect cells and mammalian cells. However, little is known regarding the effective production of this protein in organs of live organisms. Here, we report for the first time the expression and characterization of rhVEGF165 in the middle silk gland (MSG) of the transgenic silkworm line S1-V165. Our results confirmed that (1) rhVEGF165 was highly expressed in MSG cells and was secreted into the cocoon of S1-V165; (2) the dimeric form of rhVEGF165 could be easily dissolved from S1-V165 cocoons using an alkaline solution; (3) rhVEGF165 extracted from S1-V165 cocoons exhibited slightly better cell proliferative activity than the hVEGF165 standard in cultured human umbilical vein endothelial cells. This study provides an alternative strategy for the production of bioactive rhVEGF165 using the MSG of transgenic silkworms.

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Acknowledgements

We apologize to our colleagues whose work was not cited in this paper due to the publisher’s space constraints. This work was supported by Grants (31872291, 31801126) from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Chongqing Research Program of Basic Research and Frontier Technology (cstc2017jcyjBX0041, cstc2017jcyj-yszx0009). The English in the manuscript was polished by American Journal Experts.

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  1. Tianyang Zhang and Rongpeng Liu have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Silkworm Genome Biology, College of Biotechnology, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China

    Tianyang Zhang, Rongpeng Liu, Qin Luo, Dawei Qu, Tao Chen, Ou Yao & Hanfu Xu

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  1. Tianyang Zhang
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  2. Rongpeng Liu
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Correspondence to Hanfu Xu.

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Zhang, T., Liu, R., Luo, Q. et al. Expression and characterization of recombinant human VEGF165 in the middle silk gland of transgenic silkworms. Transgenic Res 28, 601–609 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11248-019-00173-y

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