Discovery and characterization of tyrosinases from sea anemone pedal disc

The formation of underwater adhesion is a complicated physiological process and many different types of enzymes are found to be essential apart from structural proteins. Previous studies have shown that various tyrosinases were present in marine adhesives, but little information is available about the over-expression and enzymatic characterization of these enzymes. Specifically, this study first identified four significantly up-regulated tyrosinases in the pedal disc of Haliplanella luciae by means of multi-omics technology, and made preliminary bioinformatics predictions. Sequence alignment showed that the Tyr1_Hl contained six conserved His residues that bind to copper ions, of which a tyrosinase with diphenolase activity named as Tyr1_HlΔ, was expressed in Escherichia coli BL21 (DE3) cells and purified by affinity chromatography. Enzymatic characterization showed that the activity of Tyr1_HlΔ was Cu2+ dependent and maximum catalytic activities were in 20 mM Tris–HCl (pH 8.0) at 37 °C. In summary, we identified novel tyrosinases in the pedal disks of sea anemone for the first time and the Tyr1_HlΔ was successfully recombinant expressed. Our study will provide basis for future exploration of bio-adhesion mechanism and design of bio-adhesives derived from sea anemones.