The expression of heterologous proteins may exert severe stress on the host cells at different levels. Depending on the specific features of the product, different steps may be rate-limiting. For the secretion of recombinant proteins from yeast cells, folding and disulfide bond formation were identified as rate-limiting in several cases and the induction of the chaperone BiP (binding protein) is described. During the development of Pichia pastoris strains secreting human trypsinogen, a severe limitation of the amount of secreted product was identified. Strains using either the AOX1 or the GAP promoter were compared at different gene copy numbers. With the constitutive GAP promoter, no effect on the expression level was observed, whereas with the inducible AOX1 promoter an increase of the copy number above two resulted in a decrease of expression. To identify whether part of the product remained in the cells, lysates were fractionated and significant amounts of the product were identified in the insoluble fraction containing the endoplasmic reticulum, while the soluble cytosolic fraction contained product only in clones using the GAP promoter. An increase of BiP was observed upon induction of expression, indicating that the intracellular product fraction exerts an unfolded protein response in the host cells. A strain using the GAP promoter was grown both on glucose and methanol and trypsinogen was identified in the insoluble fractions of both cultures, but only in the soluble fraction of the glucose grown cultures, indicating that the amounts and distribution of intracellularly retained product depends on the culture conditions, especially the carbon source.

The impact of environmental factors on the productivity of yeast cells is poorly investigated so far. Therefore, it is a major concern to improve the understanding of cellular physiology of microbial protein production hosts, including the methylotrophic yeast Pichia pastoris. Two-Dimensional Fluorescence Difference Gel electrophoresis and protein identification via mass spectrometry were applied to analyze the impact of cultivation temperature on the physiology of a heterologous protein secreting P. pastoris strain. Furthermore, specific productivity was monitored and fluxes through the central carbon metabolism were calculated. Chemostat culture conditions were applied to assess the adaption to different growth temperatures (20, 25, 30 degrees C) at steady-state conditions. Many important cellular processes, including the central carbon metabolism, stress response and protein folding are affected by changing the growth temperature. A 3-fold increased specific productivity at lower cultivation temperature for an antibody Fab fragment was accompanied by a reduced flux through the TCA-cycle, reduced levels of proteins involved in oxidative stress response and lower cellular levels of molecular chaperones. These data indicate that folding stress is generally decreased at lower cultivation temperatures, enabling more efficient heterologous protein secretion in P. pastoris host cells.

Background: Pichia pastoris is widely used as a production platform for heterologous proteins and model organism for organelle proliferation. Without a published genome sequence available, strain and process development relied mainly on analogies to other, well studied yeasts like Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Pichia pastoris is the most frequently used yeast system for heterologous protein production today. The last few years have seen several products based on this platform reach approval as biopharmaceutical drugs. Successful glycoengineering to humanize N-glycans is further fuelling this development. However, detailed understanding of the yeast's physiology, genetics and regulation has only developed rapidly in the last few years since published genome sequences have become available. An expanding toolbox of genetic elements and strains for the improvement of protein production is being generated, including promoters, gene copy-number enhancement, gene knockout and high-throughput methods. Protein folding and secretion have been identified as significant bottlenecks in yeast expression systems, pinpointing a major target for strain optimization. At the same time, it has become obvious that P. pastoris, as an evolutionarily more 'ancient' yeast, may in some cases be a better model for human cell biology and disease than Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Protein production in yeasts is related to the specific growth rate μ. To elucidate on this correlation, we studied the transcriptome of Pichia pastoris at different specific growth rates by cultivating a strain secreting human serum albumin at μ = 0.015 to 0.15 h–1 in glucose-limited chemostats. Genome-wide regulation revealed that translation-related as well as mitochondrial genes were upregulated with increasing μ, while autophagy and other proteolytic processes, carbon source-responsive genes and other targets of the TOR pathway as well as many transcriptional regulators were downregulated at higher μ. Mating and sporulation genes were most active at intermediate μ of 0.05 and 0.075 h–1. At very slow growth (μ = 0.015 h–1) gene regulation differs significantly, affecting many transporters and glucose sensing. Analysis of a subset of genes related to protein folding and secretion reveals that unfolded protein response targets such as translocation, endoplasmic reticulum genes, and cytosolic chaperones are upregulated with increasing growth rate while proteolytic degradation of secretory proteins is downregulated. We conclude that a high μ positively affects specific protein secretion rates by acting on multiple cellular processes.

The methylotrophic yeast Pichia pastoris has been used for the expression of many proteins, including antibody fragments. However, limitations became obvious especially when secreting heterodimeric Fab fragments. Up-to-date, antibody fragments have only been expressed under control of the strong inducible alcohol oxidase 1 (AOX1) promoter, which may stress the cells by excessive transcription. Here, we examined the secretion characteristics of single chain and Fab fragments of two different monoclonal anti-HIV1 antibodies (2F5 and 2G12) with both the AOX1 and the glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAP) promoter. Also, the influences of different secretion leaders and strains were evaluated. Interestingly, secretion was only achieved when using the GAP promoter and the Saccharomyces cerevisiae mating factor alpha (MFalpha leader), whereas there was no difference between the two P. pastoris strains. During fed batch fermentation of a 2F5 Fab expressing strain, intracellular retention of Fab heavy chains was observed, while both intact Fab and single light chain molecules were only detected in the supernatants. This led to the conclusion that protein folding and heterodimer assembly in the ER are rate limiting steps in Fab secretion. To alleviate this limitation, S. cerevisiae protein disulfide isomerase (PDI) and the unfolded protein response (UPR) transcription factor HAC1 were constitutively overexpressed in P. pastoris. While the overexpression of HAC1 led to a moderate increase of Fab secretion of 1.3-fold, PDI enabled an increase of the Fab level by 1.9-fold. Hence, the formation of interchain disulfide bonds can be seen as a major rate limiting factor to Fab assembly and subsequent secretion.

Efficient production of heterologous proteins with yeasts and other eukaryotic hosts is often hampered by inefficient secretion of the product. Limitation of protein secretion has been attributed to a low folding rate, and a rational solution is the overexpression of proteins supporting folding, like protein disulfide isomerase (Pdi), or the unfolded protein response transcription factor Hac1. Assuming that other protein factors which are not directly involved in protein folding may also support secretion of heterologous proteins, we set out to analyze the differential transcriptome of a Pichia pastoris strain overexpressing human trypsinogen versus that of a nonexpressing strain. Five hundred twenty-four genes were identified to be significantly regulated. Excluding those genes with totally divergent functions (like, e.g., core metabolism), we reduced this number to 13 genes which were upregulated in the expression strain having potential function in the secretion machinery and in stress regulation. The respective Saccharomyces cerevisiae homologs of these genes, including the previously characterized secretion helpers PDI1, ERO1, SSO2, KAR2/BiP, and HAC1 as positive controls, were cloned and overexpressed in a P. pastoris strain expressing a human antibody Fab fragment. All genes except one showed a positive effect on Fab fragment secretion, as did the controls. Six out of these novel secretion helper factors, more precisely Bfr2 and Bmh2 (involved in protein transport), the chaperones Ssa4 and Sse1, the vacuolar ATPase subunit Cup5, and Kin2 (a protein kinase connected to exocytosis), proved their benefits for practical application in laboratory-scale production processes by increasing both specific production rates and the volumetric productivity of an antibody fragment up to 2.5-fold in fed-batch fermentations of P. pastoris.Successful secretion of proteins has been accomplished with a variety of fungal hosts, including the yeasts Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Pichia pastoris, Hansenula polymorpha, and Kluyveromyces lactis and filamentous fungi like Aspergillus awamori and Trichoderma reesei. While the secretion of some proteins is readily achieved at high rates, many other proteins are secreted only at comparatively low levels (20,24,25). Improvement of the secretion of a recombinant protein was first attempted by random mutagenesis (1, 16). The major disadvantage of this method is usually that any positive result cannot be transferred to other strains.It has been shown in several cases that the secretion process can be enhanced by cooverexpression of proteins which support the folding and processing of other proteins (recently reviewed in references 12 and 5). Some of these supporting factors, like protein disulfide isomerase (Pdi), have catalytic activity on the proteins, and others act by binding to the proteins and preventing them from aggregation (chaperones, e.g., BiP) or by stimulating the release of the protein to the cell exterior at a later step in the secretory pathway (Sso proteins). Another approa...

High cell density cultivation of Pichia pastoris has to cope with several technical limitations, most importantly the transfer of oxygen. By applying hypoxic conditions to chemostat cultivations of P. pastoris expressing an antibody Fab fragment under the GAP promoter, a 2.5-fold increase of the specific productivity q(P) at low oxygen supply was observed. At the same time the biomass decreased and ethanol was produced, indicating a shift from oxidative to oxidofermentative conditions. Based on these results we designed a feedback control for enhanced productivity in fed batch processes, where the concentration of ethanol in the culture was kept constant at approximately 1.0% (vv(-1)) by a regulated addition of feed medium. This strategy was tested successfully with three different protein producing strains, leading to a three- to sixfold increase of the q(P) and threefold reduced fed batch times. Taken together the volumetric productivity Q(P) increased 2.3-fold.