Researchers successfully engineered cyanobacteria (Synechococcus) to produce thymosin-alpha-1 by building a shuttle expression vector with a heat-shock promoter. After brief heat induction, the foreign protein was expressed at levels reaching 7.5% of total cell protein, demonstrating a viable biological system for producing this immune-modulating peptide.
Zhang, Jun; Qin, Yan; Ouyang, Qing; Xu, Hong; Zhou, Ke Fu; Liu, Ren Hai; Lou, Shi Lin