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Human interleukin-2 (hIL-2) production in Escherichia coli and insect cell/baculovirus expression systems can be inefficient. Here we investigated secreted production of hIL-2 fused with green fluorescent protein (GFP) as a versatile fusion partner in optimized stably transfected insect Drosophila melanogaster S2 cells. This nonlytic S2 insect cell expression system employs a plasmid vector and allows for secretion of functional human proteins. We report that, following stable transfection and induction, S2 cells secreted hIL-2 as a fusion protein (approximately 2.3 microg/mL yield), with a secretion efficiency of approximately 90%. Regression analysis indicated a single linear relationship existed between GFP fluorescence and hIL-2 mass in both whole cell and secreted medium samples, indicating that in vivo monitoring and quantification of target foreign protein expression and even secretion is possible using this system. The simple comparative measurement of GFP fluorescence also allowed monitoring of secretion efficiency during periods of high GFP/hIL-2 expression.

Human transferrin (hTf) is a serum glycoprotein involved in Fe3+ transport. Here, a plasmid encoding the hTf gene fused with a hexahistidine (His6) epitope tag under Drosophila metallothionein promoter (pMT) was stably transfected into Drosophila melanogaster S2 cells as a nonlytic plasmid-based system. Following 3 days of copper sulfate induction, transfected S2 cells were found to secrete hTf into serum-free culture medium at a competitively high expression level of 40.8 microg/mL, producing 6.8 microg/mL/day in a 150-mL spinner flask culture. Purification of secreted recombinant hTf using immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC) yielded 95.5% pure recombinant hTf with a recovery of 32%. According to MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry analysis, purified S2 cell-derived His6-tagged recombinant hTf had a molecular weight (76.4 kDa) smaller than that of native apo-hTf (78.0 kDa). 2-Dimensional gel electrophoresis patterns showed recombinant hTf had a simpler and less acidic profile compared to that of native hTf. These data suggest recombinant hTf was incompletely (noncomplex) glycosylated and lacked sialic acids on N-glycans. However, this difference in N-glycan structure compared to native hTf had no effect on the iron-binding activity of recombinant hTf. The present data show that a plasmid-based stable transfection S2 cell system can be successfully employed as an alternative for producing secreted functional recombinant hTf.