Nowadays, obesity severely impacts human health and is the fifth leading risk factor that leads to death globally. Pancreatic lipase (PL) inhibitors have attracted extensive attention owing to their role in effective prevention and treatment of obesity. Here, a shark-derived single-domain antibody fusion protein was used to inhibit PL for the first time. After biopanning, the heterologous expression system pET28a-SUMO-D2 was constructed using the method of double restriction enzyme digestion and T4 ligase to achieve the soluble expression of the PL-specific antibody gene D2. According to the calculation of protein concentration, the final expression of fusion protein PL-D2S was 1.183 mg per liter of Luria Bertani broth. The binding ability of the soluble fusion protein PL-D2S to PL was identified. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay results showed that the fusion protein PL-D2S exhibited a strong binding affinity to PL. The experimental results of PL inhibition of PL-D2S in vitro showed that the fusion protein could significantly inhibit the activity of PL, with an IC50 of 404 μg/mL. Our study shows that the fusion protein PL-D2S is a potential PL inhibitor to prevent and treat obesity.
Keywords: enzymatic activity inhibition; pancreatic lipase; single-domain antibodies.