Co-refolding of two peptide fragments derived from Agrobacterium tumefaciens beta-glucosidase with catalytic activity.

Four sites of the non-homologous region (coding amino acid residues of 347, 421, 466 and 533) of a gene were randomly selected for splitting to investigate the function of beta-glucosidase from Agrobacterium tumefaciens in the co-refolding of peptides into the catalytically active enzyme. As a result of gene splitting, four N- and C-terminal domain peptides were obtained as insoluble inclusion bodies. No catalytic activity was observed when these fragments refolded individually. However, a considerable amount of activity was restored when the two fragments derived from N- and C- terminal peptides were co-refolded together. The deletion of amino acid residues in the non-homologous region resulted in a complete loss of enzyme activity, which suggests that truncation of amino acids in this region strongly affects the co-refolding ability of the enzyme to maintain activity.