Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley Previously Published Works bannerUC Berkeley

An in vitro tag-and-modify protein sample generation method for single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer

Abstract

Biomolecular systems exhibit many dynamic and biologically relevant properties, such as conformational fluctuations, multistep catalysis, transient interactions, folding, and allosteric structural transitions. These properties are challenging to detect and engineer using standard ensemble-based techniques. To address this drawback, single-molecule methods offer a way to access conformational distributions, transient states, and asynchronous dynamics inaccessible to these standard techniques. Fluorescence-based single-molecule approaches are parallelizable and compatible with multiplexed detection; to date, however, they have remained limited to serial screens of small protein libraries. This stems from the current absence of methods for generating either individual dual-labeled protein samples at high throughputs or protein libraries compatible with multiplexed screening platforms. Here, we demonstrate that by combining purified and reconstituted in vitro translation, quantitative unnatural amino acid incorporation via AUG codon reassignment, and copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition, we can overcome these challenges for target proteins that are, or can be, methionine-depleted. We present an in vitro parallelizable approach that does not require laborious target-specific purification to generate dual-labeled proteins and ribosome-nascent chain libraries suitable for single-molecule FRET-based conformational phenotyping. We demonstrate the power of this approach by tracking the effects of mutations, C-terminal extensions, and ribosomal tethering on the structure and stability of three protein model systems: barnase, spectrin, and T4 lysozyme. Importantly, dual-labeled ribosome-nascent chain libraries enable single-molecule co-localization of genotypes with phenotypes, are well suited for multiplexed single-molecule screening of protein libraries, and should enable the in vitro directed evolution of proteins with designer single-molecule conformational phenotypes of interest.

Many UC-authored scholarly publications are freely available on this site because of the UC's open access policies. Let us know how this access is important for you.

Main Content
For improved accessibility of PDF content, download the file to your device.
Current View