Construction of a Protein Crystalline Inclusion-Based Enzyme Immobilization System for Biosynthesis of PAPS from ATP and Sulfate

3′-Phosphoadenosine-5′-phosphosulfate (PAPS) is the bioactive form of sulfate and is involved in all biological sulfation reactions. The enzymatic transformation method for PAPS is promising, but the low efficiency and high cost of enzyme purification and storage restrict its practical applications. Here, we reported PAPS biosynthesis with a protein crystalline inclusion (PCI)-based enzyme immobilization system. First, the in vivo crystalline inclusion protein CipA was identified as an efficient auto-assembly tag for immobilizing the bifunctional PAPS synthase (ASAK). After characterizing the pyrophosphokinase activity of a polyphosphate exonuclease PaPPX from Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and optimizing the linker fragment, auto-assembled enzymes ASAK-PT-CipA and PaPPX-PT-CipA were constructed. Then, the auto-assembled enzymes ASAK-PT-CipA and PaPPX-PT-CipA with high stability were co-expressed and immobilized for constructing a transformation system. The highest transformation rate of PAPS from ATP and sulfate reached 90%, and the immobilized enzyme can be reused 10 times. The present work provided a convenient, efficient, and easy to be enlarged auto-immobilization system for PAPS biosynthesis from ATP and sulfate. The immobilization system also represented a new approach to reduce the production cost of PAPS by facilitating the purification, storage, and reuse of related enzymes, and it would boost the studies on biotechnological production of glycosaminoglycans and sulfur-containing natural compounds.