Abstract
Sample solubility is essential for structural studies of proteins by solution NMR. Attachment of a solubility enhancement tag, such as GB1, MBP and thioredoxin, to a target protein has been used for this purpose. However, signal overlap of the tag with the target protein often made the spectral analysis difficult. Here we report a sortase-mediated protein ligation method to eliminate NMR signals arising from the tag by preparing the isotopically labeled target protein attached with the non-labeled GB1 tag at the C-terminus.
Abbreviations
- SDS-PAGE:
-
Sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis
- INSET:
-
Isotopically invisible solubility/stability enhancement tag
References
Bagby S, Tong KI, Liu D, Alattia JR, Ikura M (1997) The button test: a small scale method using microdialysis cells for assessing protein solubility at concentrations suitable for NMR. J Biomol NMR 10:279–282
Camarero JA, Shekhtman A, Campbell EA, Chlenov M, Gruber TM, Bryant DA, Darst SA, Cowburn D, Muir TW (2002) Autoregulation of a bacterial σ factor explored by using segmental isotopic labeling and NMR. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 99:8536–8541
Chang YG, Song AX, Gao YG, Shi YH, Lin XJ, Cao XT, Lin DH, Hu HY (2006) Solution structure of the ubiquitin-associated domain of human BMSC-UbP and its complex with ubiquitin. Protein Sci 15:1248–1259
Gronenborn AM, Filpula DR, Essig NZ, Achari A, Whitlow M, Wingfield PT, Clore GM (1991) A novel, highly stable fold of the immunoglobulin binding domain of streptococcal protein G. Science 253:657–661
Huang B, Eberstadt M, Olejniczak ET, Meadows RP, Fesik SW (1996) NMR structure and mutagenesis of the Fas (APO-1/CD95) death domain. Nature 384:638–641
Huth JR, Bewley CA, Jackson BM, Hinnebusch AG, Clore GM, Gronenborn AM (1997) Design of an expression system for detecting folded protein domains and mapping macromolecular interactions by NMR. Protein Sci 6:2359–2364
Kobashigawa Y, Naito M, Inagaki F (2007a) An efficient method for protein phosphorylation using the artificially introduced of cognate-binding modules into kinases and substrates. J Biotechnol 131:458–465
Kobashigawa Y, Sakai M, Naito M, Yokochi M, Kumeta H, Makino Y, Ogura K, Tanaka S, Inagaki F (2007b) Structural basis for the transforming activity of human cancer-related signaling adaptor protein CRK. Nat Struct Mol Biol 14:503–510
Mao H, Hart SA, Schink A, Pollok BA (2004) Sortase-mediated protein ligation: a new method for protein engineering. J Am Chem Soc 126:2670–2671
Mazmanian SK, Liu G, Ton-That H, Schneewind O (1999) Staphylococcus aureus sortase, an enzyme that anchors surface proteins to the cell wall. Science 285:760–763
Muralidharan V, Muir TW (2006) Protein ligation: an enabling technology for the biophysical analysis of proteins. Nat Method 3:429–438
Novick RP (2000) Sortase: the surface protein anchoring transpeptidase and the LPXTG motif. Trends Microbiol 8:148–151
Nyanguile O, Dancik C, Blakemore J, Mulgrew K, Kaleko M, Stevenson SC (2003) Synthesis of adenoviral targeting molecules by intein-mediated protein ligation. Gene Ther 10:1362–1369
Otomo T, Teruya K, Uegaki K, Yamazaki T, Kyogoku Y (1999) Improved segmental isotope labeling of proteins and application to a larger protein. J Biomol NMR 14:105–114
Perry AM, Ton-That H, Mazmanian SK, Schneewind O (2002) Anchoring of surface proteins to the cell wall of Staphylococcus aureus. III. Lipid II is an in vivo peptidoglycan substrate for sortase-catalyzed surface protein anchoring. PXTG motif. J Biol Chem 277:16241–16248
Safadi SS, Shaw GS (2007) A disease state mutation unfolds the parkin ubiquitin-like domain. Biochemistry 46:14162–14169
Sugase K, Landes MA, Wright PE, Martinez-Yamout M (2008) Overexpression of post-translationally modified peptides in Escherichia coli by co-expression with modifying enzymes. Protein Expres Purif 57:108–115
Xu R, Ayers B, Cowburn D, Muir TW (1999) Chemical ligation of folded recombinant proteins: segmental isotopic labeling of domains for NMR studies. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 96:388–393
Yamazaki T, Otomo T, Oda N, Kyogoku Y, Uegaki K, Ito N, Ishino Y, Nakamura H (1998) Segmental isotope labeling for protein NMR using peptide splicing. J Am Chem Soc 120:5591–5592
Zhou P, Lugovskoy AA, Wagner G (2001) A solubility-enhancement tag (SET) for NMR studies of poor behaving proteins. J Biomol NMR 20:11–14
Züger S, Iwai H (2005) Intein-based biosynthetic incorporation of unlabeled protein tags into isotopically labeled proteins for NMR studies. Nat Biotechnol 23:736–740
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research and the National Project on “Targeted Proteins Research Program” from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Japan.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic supplementary material
Experimental materials and methods, including that for protein expression, purification and conjugation as well as SDS-PAGE analysis of protein ligation are available. Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kobashigawa, Y., Kumeta, H., Ogura, K. et al. Attachment of an NMR-invisible solubility enhancement tag using a sortase-mediated protein ligation method. J Biomol NMR 43, 145–150 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10858-008-9296-5
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10858-008-9296-5