Cloning and expression in Escherichia coli of the synthetic proenkephalin analogue gene.

Enkephalins are pentapeptides with opioid activity that have been found in brain and other neural tissues. They are released by proteolytic processing of the proenkephalin, which contains several enkephalin sequences each flanked by pairs of basic amino acid (aa) residues. We have constructed an artificial variant of the proenkephalin gene by concatenation of synthetic oligodeoxynucleotides (oligo) coding for Met-enkephalin preceded by two arginines. One of the resulting structures, containing eleven enkephalin sequences separated by pairs of arginine codons, was cloned in the expression vector pRE31. The biological activity of enkephalin was detected after the digestion of the isolated plasmid-coded protein with trypsin and carboxypeptidase B. The product of the synthetic gene may thus serve as a defined simplified substrate for the study of the not yet fully understood enzymatic mechanisms of proenkephalin processing.