Intracellular Selection of Theophylline-Sensitive Hammerhead Aptazyme

Abstract Hammerhead ribozyme based aptazyme (HHAz), inheriting the advantages of small size and high efficiency from the RNA-cleaving ribozyme and the specific recognition ability of aptamers to specific targets, exhibits the huge potential to be a transgene expression regulator. Herein, we report a selection strategy for HHAz by using a toxin protein ibsC as the reporter to offer a positive phenotype, thus realizing an easy-operating, time- and labor-saving selection of HHAz variants with desired properties. Based on this strategy, we obtained a new HHAzs (TAP-1) which could react sensitively towards the extracellular regulatory molecule, theophylline, both in prokaryotic and eukaryotic systems. With fluorescent protein reporter, the intracellular switching efficiencies of TAP-1 and other reported theophylline-dependent HHAzs has been quantitatively evaluated, showing that TAP-1 not only exhibits the best downregulating ability at high concentration of theophylline but also maintains high activity with 0.1 mM theophylline which is a safe concentration in the human body.