Enrichment of production yield of therapeutic proteins in mammalian cell cultures by modulation of the mRNA stability of the target protein to increase its in vivo half-life is a new strategy in biotechnological applications. The present article describes one of the most novel approaches to modulate mRNA stability by application of 3'-noncoding region (3'NCR) from RNA viral genome in the expression constructs. Our data indicated that although utilizing the 3'NCR sequence form poliovirus (PV-3'NCR) downstream of the target gene might generally stabilize the secondary structure of RNA, it influenced the mRNA stability (and thereby the amount of protein production) in a cell type and time-dependent manner, thus indicating a central role of mRNA-stabilizing binding sites/cellular factors in this process. Our data might be of interest to the biotechnology community to improve recombinant protein production in mammalian cell cultures and RNA-based therapy/vaccination approaches.
Keywords: 3′NCR; RNA secondary structure; post transcriptional RNA processing; protein expression.
© 2014 International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.