A modular platform for scalable recombinant production of highly toxic bacterial proteins

Abstract

Bacterial protein toxins constitute a vast and largely untapped reservoir of antimicrobial activities with substantial therapeutic and biotechnological potential. However, their intrinsic toxicity frequently prevents stable recombinant expression in bacterial hosts, creating a major bottleneck for biochemical characterization, structural analysis, and development as antimicrobial agents. Here, we present a modular platform for the scalable recombinant production of highly toxic bacterial proteins based on transient intramolecular toxin neutralization. The strategy covalently links each toxin to its cognate immunity protein, promoting neutralization during biosynthesis while permitting recovery of the native toxin through site-specific proteolytic cleavage. Using this approach, we produced multiple previously intractable polymorphic toxin domains that could not be obtained using conventional inducible expression, toxin–immunity co-expression, or bacterial cell-free systems. We further streamlined the production workflow through intracellular protease-mediated cleavage, reducing the purification process from four steps to two and increasing protein recovery. To address cases in which native immunity proteins were insufficient, we incorporated computational protein design to engineer improved toxin-binding partners, enabling production of an additional toxin that remained refractory to the original platform. Purified toxins retained enzymatic activity following denaturation and refolding, confirming recovery of functional proteins and enabling identification of a previously uncharacterized nuclease activity. Together, these findings establish a scalable and adaptable microbial biotechnology platform for the production of intrinsically toxic proteins. The integration of transient intramolecular neutralization with computational engineering provides a route toward systematic production and characterization of toxic proteins for antimicrobial discovery, structural biology, protein engineering, and future biotechnological applications.