Abstract: Protein tyrosine phosphatases(PTPs) are crucial regulators of signal transduction. Among them, PTP-MEG2 is an intracellular enzyme of 593 amino acid residues with a putative lipid-binding domain at the N-terminus. In the present study, we cloned the full-length form of the enzyme and expressed it in E. coli cells as a 6xHis-tagged protein. The majority of the expressed enzyme was found in the inclusion body of E. coli cell extracts. Upon extraction with a buffer containing urea, the recombinant enzyme was purified to near homogeneity on a single Ni-NTA-agarose column. This procedure resulted in the production of over 100 mg of purified recombinant PTP-MEG2 from 1 L E. coli cell culture. The purified protein displayed a single polypeptide band with expected molecular size on SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis under reducing conditions. Isolated under denatured conditions in urea, the purified enzyme was re-natured by dialyzing against a refolding buffer. The re-natured enzyme effectively dephosphorylated the common PTP substrate para-nitrophenylphosphate with a specific activity of 2000 units/mg. Meanwhile, the denatured enzyme was used to immunize a rabbit to produce antibodies. The resulting anti- serum had extremely high sensitivity and specificity. When used for Western blot analysis, the anti-serum revealed a wide expression of PTP-MEG2 in many tissues of mice. Together, we developed a highly effective way to purify a large amount of PTP-MEG2 and generated highly sensitive antibodies that can specifically detect endogenous expression of the enzyme in tissues.

Key words: Protein tyrosine phosphatase, Expression, Antibody production, Enzyme assay, Tissue expression