Expression and purification of Junín Virus Z protein

SANDRA ELIZABETH GOÑI; CRISTINA SILVIA BORIO; FABIÁN ROMANO-CHERÑAC; ROSANA VERONICA ROTA; MARCELA GABRIELA PILLOFF; JAVIER ALONSO ISERTE; MARIA ALEJANDRA TORTORICI; BETINA INÉS STEPHAN; MARCOS FABIÁN BILEN; PABLO DANIEL GHIRINGHELLI; MARIO ENRIQUE LOZANO

JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICINE AND BIOTECHNOLOGY

HINDAWI PUBLISHING CORPORATION

Lugar: New York; Año: 2010 vol. 2010 p. 1 - 14

1110-7243

*E. Goni and C. S. Borio contributed equally to this work. Arenaviridae comprises 23 recognized virus species with a bipartite ssRNA genome and an ambisense coding strategy. The virions are enveloped and include nonequimolar amounts of each genomic RNA species, designated L and S, coding for four ORFs (N, GPC, L, and Z). The arenavirus Junín (JUNV) is the etiological agent of Argentine Hemorrhagic Fever, an acute disease with high mortality rate. It has been proposed that Z is the functional counterpart of the matrix proteins found in other negative-stranded enveloped RNA viruses. Here we report the optimized expression of a synthetic gene of Z protein, using three expression systems (two bacterial and a baculoviral one). One of these recombinant proteins was used to generate antibodies. A bioinformatic analysis was made where Z was subdivided into three domains. The data presented contributes methodologies for Z recombinant production and provides the basis for the development of new experiments to test its function.