A novel high-throughput screen for identifying lipids that stabilise membrane proteins in detergent based solution
File(s)journal.pone.0254118.pdf (1.53 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Membrane proteins have a range of crucial biological functions and are the target of about 60% of all prescribed drugs. For most studies, they need to be extracted out of the lipid-bilayer, e.g. by detergent solubilisation, leading to the loss of native lipids, which may disturb important protein-lipid/bilayer interactions and thus functional and structural integrity. Relipidation of membrane proteins has proven extremely successful for studying challenging targets, but the identification of suitable lipids can be expensive and laborious. Therefore, we developed a screen to aid the high-throughput identification of beneficial lipids. The screen covers a large lipid space and was designed to be suitable for a range of stability assessment methods. Here, we demonstrate its use as a tool for identifying stabilising lipids for three membrane proteins: a bacterial pyrophosphatase (Tm-PPase), a fungal purine transporter (UapA) and a human GPCR (A2AR). A2AR is stabilised by cholesteryl hemisuccinate, a lipid well known to stabilise GPCRs, validating the approach. Additionally, our screen also identified a range of new lipids which stabilised our test proteins, providing a starting point for further investigation and demonstrating its value as a novel tool for membrane protein research. The pre-dispensed screen will be made commercially available to the scientific community in future and has a number of potential applications in the field.
Date Issued
2021-07-12
Date Acceptance
2021-06-20
Citation
PLoS One, 2021, 16 (7), pp.1-20
ISSN
1932-6203
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Start Page
1
End Page
20
Journal / Book Title
PLoS One
Volume
16
Issue
7
Copyright Statement
© 2021 Cecchetti et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
License URL
Sponsor
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
Commission of the European Communities
Identifier
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0254118
Grant Number
BB/N016467/1
722687
Subjects
General Science & Technology
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2021-07-12