Profiling of N-glycosylation gene expression in CHO cell fed-batch cultures.

One of the goals of recombinant glycoprotein production is to achieve consistent glycosylation. Although many studies have examined the changes in the glycosylation quality of recombinant protein with culture, very little has been done to examine the underlying changes in glycosylation gene expression as a culture progresses. In this study, the expression of 24 genes involved in N-glycosylation were examined using quantitative RT PCR to gain a better understanding of recombinant glycoprotein glycosylation during production processes. Profiling of the N-glycosylation genes as well as concurrent analysis of glycoprotein quality was performed across the exponential, stationary and death phases of a fed-batch culture of a CHO cell line producing recombinant human interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma). Of the 24 N-glycosylation genes examined, 21 showed significant up- or down-regulation of gene expression as the fed-batch culture progressed from exponential, stationary and death phase. As the fed-batch culture progressed, there was also an increase in less sialylated IFN-gamma glycoforms, leading to a 30% decrease in the molar ratio of sialic acid to recombinant IFN-gamma. This correlated with decreased expression of genes involved with CMP sialic acid synthesis coupled with increased expression of sialidases. Compared to batch culture, a low glutamine fed-batch strategy appears to need a 0.5 mM glutamine threshold to maintain similar N-glycosylation genes expression levels and to achieve comparable glycoprotein quality. This study demonstrates the use of quantitative real time PCR method to identify possible "bottlenecks" or "compromised" pathways in N-glycosylation and subsequently allow for the development of strategies to improve glycosylation quality.

The characterization of biomolecular secondary structures by surface plasmon resonance.

Recently there has been considerable interest in using surface plasmon resonance (SPR) for the measurement of conformational changes of immobilized biomolecules that are induced by an exogenous analyte. While a number of studies have shown the analytical utility of such measurements, there has been no report which characterizes the specific secondary structure that actuates the change in SPR signal. The use of SPR to indicate the type of secondary structure present in two immobilized polypeptides, poly-L-lysine (PL) and poly-L-glutamic acid (PGA), and a globular protein, concanavalin A (Con A) is described in this report. The PL, PGA and Con A were modified with N-succinimidyl 3-(2-pyridyldithiol) propionate (SPDP) to introduce disulfide groups to facilitate the attachment onto gold-coated surfaces via self-assembly. Ethanol and 2,2,2-trifluoroethanol (TFE) were used to induce changes in the secondary structure of the immobilized polypeptides and the protein respectively. Using both circular dichroism (CD) and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopies, it has been demonstrated that it is possible to correlate the signal changes observed in SPR to the secondary conformation of the biomolecule. Both CD and FTIR showed that a decrease in SPR signal corresponded to a high content of beta, turn or unordered structures while an increase corresponded to a high alpha-helical content. The sensitivity of the SPR technique is comparable to that obtained in solution with CD and FTIR spectroscopies. These results are the first demonstration that SPR can be used to characterize secondary structures. There is potential, therefore, for SPR to be used as a technique to study secondary conformational changes of immobilized polypeptides and proteins.