Optimisation of the foot-and-mouth disease virus 2A co-expression system for biomedical applications

Abstract

Many biomedical applications require the expression or production of therapeutic hetero-multimeric proteins/protein complexes: in most cases only accomplished by co-ordinated co-expression within the same cell. Foot-and-mouth disease virus 2A (F2A) and ‘2A-like’ sequences are now widely used for this purpose. Since 2A mediates a co-translational ‘cleavage’ at its own C-terminus, sequences encoding multiple proteins (linked via 2As) can be concatenated into a single ORF: a single transgene. It has been shown that in some cases, however, the cleavage efficiency of shorter versions of F2A may be inhibited by the C-terminus of certain gene sequences immediately upstream of F2A. This paper describes further work to optimise F2A for co-expression strategies.