pTSara-NatB, an improved N-terminal acetylation system for recombinant protein expression in E. coli.

N-terminal acetylation is one of the most common co- and post-translational modifications of the eukaryotic proteome and regulates numerous aspects of cellular physiology, such as protein folding, localization and turnover. In particular α-synuclein, whose dyshomeostasis has been tied to the pathogenesis of several neurodegenerative disorders, is completely Nα-acetylated in nervous tissue. In this work, building on previous reports, we develop and characterize a bacterial N-terminal acetylation system based on the expression of the yeast N-terminal acetyltransferase B (NatB) complex under the control of the PBAD (L-arabinose-inducible) promoter. We show its functionality and the ability to completely Nα-acetylate our model substrate α-synuclein both upon induction of the construct with L-arabinose and also by only relying on the constitutive expression of the NatB genes.