Identification and analysis of the tissue factor pathway inhibitor 2 of Sciaenops ocellatus

Tissue factor pathway inhibitor 2 (TFPI-2) is a structural homologue of TFPI, a potent inhibitor of tissue factor (TF)-mediated coagulation. Although TFPI-2 has been identified at sequence level in several fish species, no study on piscine TFPI-2 has been documented. In this report, we identified and analyzed a TFPI-2 homologue, SoTFPI2, from red drum Sciaenops ocellatus. The open reading frame of SoTFPI2 is 681 bp, which encodes a 226-residue protein that shares 59.2–82.3% overall sequence identities with known fish TFPI-2. SoTFPI2 possesses three tandem Kunitz domains and is negatively charged at the N-terminus and positively charged at the C-terminus. Expression of SoTFPI2 was detected, in increasing order, in spleen, muscle, gill, brain, liver, kidney, blood, and heart. Bacterial challenge and lipopolysaccharide treatment significantly upregulated SoTFPI2 expression in kidney in time-dependent manners. Recombinant SoTFPI2 purified from Escherichia coli inhibits the proteolytic activity of trypsin and exhibits bactericidal effect on a fish pathogen. Take together, these results indicate that SoTFPI2 is a biologically active serine protease inhibitor with antibacterial property and is likely to play a role in anti-bacterial infection.