Engineering Soluble Aggregation-Prone and Membrane-Bound Proteins

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DESCRIPTION: (provided by applicant): Structural biology and, in recent years, structural proteomics have yielded tremendous insight into protein mechanism and function. However, a high percentage of proteins remain off-limits to high-throughput structure determination methods. For example, solving structures of membrane-bound proteins is a difficult and idiosyncratic art. Furthermore, proteins susceptible to aggregation are simply not amenable to current methods for structure determination. The first long-term goal of the research proposed here is the development of a high-throughput method for converting insoluble proteins, both membrane-bound and oligomerization-prone, to soluble proteins upon which the powerful tools of structural biology can be brought to bear. An equally important second long-term goal is to elucidate and understand the characteristics of protein structure leading to aggregate and membrane bound states. Determining the structures of previously unattainable targets will expedite the development of therapeutics for a host of diseases, such as disorders resulting from amyloid fibril formation, a specific type of protein aggregation. Specifically, the experiments proposed here focus on the caveolin-1, a key regulator of signal transduction. Caveolin-1 binds to a large number of different cellular proteins, and can inhibit key enzymes, including protein kinase A (PKA) and endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS). Such activities allow selections for functional, yet more soluble, caveolin-1 variants. As both an aggregation-prone and membrane-associated protein, caveolin-1 provides an ideal system for the planned experiments. In essence, one series of experiments will uncover molecular determinants for both aggregation and membrane binding. In the first specific aim, the determinants of solubility, aggregation, and membrane-binding will be investigated during experiments aimed at engineering soluble variants of caveolin. The structure of the soluble variant will be determined by solution phase NMR in the second specific aim. This structure will be compared to a structure determined by solid-state NMR of an aggregated variant of caveolin. Structural insight will be then guide mutagenesis experiments aimed at testing the mechanistic basis for protein aggregation and membrane-binding.