Cloning and heterologous expression in Escherichia coli of the fission yeast vip1 gene, showing differential expression after aldosterone treatment

The steroid hormone aldosterone was found to be associated with fibrosis of the heart. Therefore, we are investigating the effects of the mineralocorticoids aldosterone and 11-deoxycorticosterone (DOC), its precursor, on the proteome, focussing on the receptor-independent, non-genomic actions in the model organism Schizosaccharomyces pombe. One of the proteins that was found to be significantly regulated by both DOC and aldosterone, vip1, seems to be involved in the regulation of the cytoskeleton and in non-genomic steroid hormone actions, but its functionality remains unclear. Further investigations of vip1 require the availability of larger amounts of the protein. Therefore, we heterologously expressed vip1 in Escherichia coli and performed a bioinformatic analysis of the protein as well as an in vitro characterization.