Abstract
NMR spectroscopy has distinct advantages for providing insight into protein structures, but faces significant resolution challenges as protein size increases. To alleviate such resonance overlap issues, the ability to produce segmentally labeled proteins is beneficial. Here we show that the S. aureus transpeptidase sortase A can be used to catalyze the ligation of two separately expressed domains of the same protein, MecA (B. subtilis). The yield of purified, segmentally labeled MecA protein conjugate is ~40%. The resultant HSQC spectrum obtained from this domain-labeled conjugate demonstrates successful application of sortase A for segmental labeling of multi-domain proteins for solution NMR study.
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Abbreviations
- HSQC:
-
Heteronuclear single quantum coherence
- SDS-PAGE:
-
Sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis
- SEC:
-
Size-exclusion chromatography
- NOE:
-
Nuclear Overhauser effect
- MS:
-
Mass spectrometry
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank H. Mao for early discussions regarding sortase. S. Dave, P. Kaur, E. Lao and M. Zandi are thanked for assistance at various stages of this project. Dr. M. Howell is gratefully acknowledged for many helpful discussions. Dr. K. Greis (University of Cincinnati Proteomics Facility) is thanked for assistance with in-gel tryptic digestion, MS/MS experiments. Funding from NIH (GM55769 and GM65156 to JC, GM063855 to MR, and RR19077 and RR027755 to the UC College of Medicine NMR facility) is acknowledged.
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Refaei, M.A., Combs, A., Kojetin, D.J. et al. Observing selected domains in multi-domain proteins via sortase-mediated ligation and NMR spectroscopy. J Biomol NMR 49, 3–7 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10858-010-9464-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10858-010-9464-2