Chicken hypersensitive site-4 insulator increases human serum albumin expression in bovine mammary epithelial cells modified with phiC31 integrase

Achieving high expression levels of recombinant human serum albumin (HSA) for purification is a solution for the large amount of plasma-derived HSA needed in therapeutic applications. Here, we employed phiC31 integrase system and chicken hypersensitive site-4 (cHS4) insulators to construct a HSA expression vector for high-level HSA expression. The phiC31 integrase system mediated efficient transgene integration in bovine mammary epithelial cells (bMECs). A preferred pseudo attP site, which had 38 % identity with the 39 bp wild-type attP sequence, was detected in six out of 55 bMEC colonies. Addition of the cHS4 insulator to the phiC31 integrase system resulted in 8–20-fold increases of HSA expression compared with that of using integrase alone. Moreover, the reverse-oriented cHS4 insulator in the phiC31 integrase system provided the optimal level of HSA expression in bMECs.