Isolation, characterization and evaluation of the Pichia pastoris sorbitol dehydrogenase promoter for expression of heterologous proteins

Sorbitol is used as a non-repressive carbon source to develop fermentation process for Muts recombinant clones obtained using the AOX1 promoter in Pichia pastoris. Sorbitol dehydrogenase is an enzyme in the carbohydrate metabolism that catalyzes reduction of d-fructose into d-sorbitol in the presence of NADH. The small stretch of 211 bps upstream region of sorbitol dehydrogenase coding gene has all the promoter elements like CAAT box, GC box, etc. It is able to promote protein production under repressive as well as non-repressive carbon sources. In this study, the strength of the sorbitol dehydrogenase promoter was evaluated by expression of two heterologous proteins: human serum albumin and erythrina trypsin inhibitor. Sorbitol dehydrogenase promoter allowed constitutive expression of recombinant proteins in all carbon sources that were tested to grow P. pastoris and showed activity similar to GAP promoter. The sorbitol dehydrogenase promoter was active in all the growth phases of the P. pastoris.