(1) Background: Producing active antimicrobial peptides with disulfide bonds in bacterial strains is challenging. The cytoplasm of Escherichia coli has a reducing environment, which is not favorable to the formation of disulfide bonds. Additionally, E. coli may express proteins as insoluble aggregates known as inclusion bodies and have proteolytic systems that can degrade recombinant peptides. Using E. coli strains like SHuffle and tagging the peptides with fusion proteins is a common strategy to overcome these difficulties. Still, the larger size of carrier proteins can affect the final yield of recombinant peptides. Therefore, a small fusion protein that can be purified using affinity chromatography may be an ideal strategy for producing antimicrobial peptides in E. coli. (2) Methods: In this study, we investigated the use of the small metal-binding protein SmbP as a fusion partner for expressing and purifying the antimicrobial peptide scygonadin in E. coli. Two constructs were designed: a monomer and a tandem repeat; both were tagged with SmbP at the N-terminus. The constructs were expressed in E. coli SHuffle T7 and purified using immobilized metal-affinity chromatography. Finally, their antimicrobial activity was determined against Staphylococcus aureus. (3) Results: SmbP is a remarkable fusion partner for purifying both scygonadin constructs, yielding around 20 mg for the monomer and 30 mg for the tandem repeat per 1 mL of IMAC column, reaching 95% purity. Both protein constructs demonstrated antimicrobial activity against S. aureus at MICs of 4 μM and 40 μM, respectively. (4) Conclusions: This study demonstrates the potential of SmbP for producing active peptides for therapeutic applications. The two scygonadin constructs in this work showed promising antimicrobial activity against S. aureus, suggesting they could be potential candidates for developing new antimicrobial drugs.
Keywords: Escherichia coli; SmbP; Staphylococcus aureus; antimicrobial peptides; immobilized metal-affinity chromatography; recombinant peptides; scygonadin.