A common cause of autoimmune diseases and cancer is excessive or uncontrolled expression of cytokines. Cytokines are small protein and glycoprotein molecules that can act pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory and play a role as communication factors between cells, especially in the immune response. Two cytokines that play such a role in the immune system are IL-6 and IL-22. To inhibit their excessive activity, this master's thesis aimed to create genetic constructs that would encode antagonists of their receptors IL-6Rα and IL-22Rα1. Currently, the most common approach for the treatment of autoimmune diseases and cancer through neutralization of cytokine signaling is the use of monoclonal antibodies, which, have many limitations. Therefore, small non-immunoglobulin protein binders with some improved properties are being developed, and were also used in this thesis. As an expression host and delivery system, we used bacterium Lactococcus lactis, which can survive the passage through the gastrointestinal tract due to its properties. We inserted genes for non-immunoglobulin binders ABR099S, ABR167, NEF108, and NEF163 into plasmids pSDBA3b and pSD-Her2-Flag, which enable the display of binders on the bacterial surface due to the signal peptide Usp45 and anchor domain cAcmA. We analyzed the binders displayed on the bacterial surface using dot blot, confocal microscopy, NaDS-PAGE followed by Western blot (detection with Flag tag antibodies), and flow cytometry. All methods confirmed the presence of all binders on the surface, with Flag-ABR099S and Flag-NEF108 demonstrating the highest expression. In the next step, we confirmed the presence of Flag-tagged binders in the conditioned medium using NaDS-PAGE and Western blotting. The binders remained in the medium due to incomplete anchoring of the anchor domain in the bacterial cell wall after the secretion of recombinant proteins from the bacteria. Flow cytometry was used to analyze the binding of proteins to the desired receptors, which was relatively weak. The most effective binding was that of the Flag-NEF108 protein to IL-6Rα. Given the current interest in the field of postbiotics, which includes extracellular vesicles, we tested whether L. lactis produces extracellular vesicles and analyzed whether the secreted vesicles contain recombinant proteins. We confirmed the presence of vesicles in samples using electron microscopy. We analyzed the isolated vesicles using NaDS-PAGE and Western blotting and confirmed the presence of expressed binders in bacterial vesicles.
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