Engineering protein thermostability using a generic activity-independent biophysical screen inside the cell

Protein stability is often a limiting factor in the development of commercial proteins and biopharmaceuticals, as well as for biochemical and structural studies. Unfortunately, identifying stabilizing mutations is not trivial since most are neutral or deleterious. Here we describe a high-throughput...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Asial, Ignacio, Cheng, Yue Xiang, Engman, Henrik, Dollhopf, Maria, Wu, Binghuang, Nordlund, Pär, Cornvik, Tobias
Other Authors: School of Biological Sciences
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/103599
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/19332
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Protein stability is often a limiting factor in the development of commercial proteins and biopharmaceuticals, as well as for biochemical and structural studies. Unfortunately, identifying stabilizing mutations is not trivial since most are neutral or deleterious. Here we describe a high-throughput colony-based stability screen, which is a direct and biophysical read-out of intrinsic protein stability in contrast to traditional indirect activity-based methods. By combining the method with a random mutagenesis procedure, we successfully identify thermostable variants from 10 diverse and challenging proteins, including several biotechnologically important proteins such as a single-chain antibody, a commercial enzyme and an FDA-approved protein drug. We also show that thermostabilization of a protein drug using our approach translates into dramatic improvements in long-term stability. As the method is generic and activity independent, it can easily be applied to a wide range of proteins.