A major attraction in using Bacillus subtilis as an expression host for heterologous protein production is its ability to secrete extracellular proteins into the culture medium. To take full advantage of this system, an efficient method for recovering the target protein is crucial. For secretory proteins which cannot be purified by a simple scheme, in vitro biotinylation using biotin ligase (BirA) offers an effective alternative for their purification. The availability of large amounts of quality BirA can be critical for in vitro biotinylation. We report here the engineering and production of an Escherichia coli BirA and its application in the purification of staphylokinase, a fibrin-specific plasminogen activator, from the culture supernatant of Bacillus subtilis via in vitro biotinylation. BirA was tagged with both a chitin-binding domain and a hexahistidine tail to facilitate both its purification and its removal from the biotinylated sample. We show in this paper how, in a unique way, we solved the problem of protein aggregation in the E. coli BirA production system to achieve a yield of soluble functional BirA hitherto unreported in the literature. Application of this novel BirA to protein purification via in vitro biotinylation in general will also be discussed. Biotinylated staphylokinase produced in the study not only can act as an intermediate for easy purification, it can also serve as an important element in the creation of a blood clot targeting and dissolving agent. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).