Identification of the anchoring protein SpoIIIJ for construction of the microbial cell surface display system in Bacillus spp.

Microbial cell surface display technology is a powerful tool for displaying proteins on the surfaces of cells. However, few anchoring proteins can be employed for the display of target proteins on the cell surface of the environmentally benign Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis. In this study, bioinformatics tools were used to screen all of the encoded proteins of B. subtilis for potential anchoring proteins. A green fluorescent protein (eGFP) reporter system was constructed to evaluate the cell-display efficiency of the selected membrane proteins and their promoters. The anchoring protein SpoIIIJ demonstrated the strongest anchoring activity of all of the selected anchoring proteins from Bacillus spp. cells. A linker was designed to link the anchoring protein SpoIIIJ and eGFP, which had the ability to increase the expression of the fusion protein by 58.32%. Two bio-remediated related proteins (the organophosphorus hydrolase OPHC2 and the metal binding protein CadR) were successfully expressed on the cell surfaces of Bacillus spp. using this system. Therefore, our results suggest that this microbial surface display system may be useful for the expression of target proteins on the cell surfaces and has potential applications in the bioremediation of environmental pollution.