HOUSTON (Feb. 9, 2012) -- A Rice University undergraduate will depart with not only a degree but also a possible patent for his invention of an efficient way to create protein libraries, an important component of biomolecular research.
Rice senior Manan Mehta discovered a method to create libraries of "circularly permuted" proteins at the suggestion of his mentor, bioengineer Jonathan Silberg. The research was reported this week in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.
In a process Mehta calls "permutation using transposase engineering," he created variations of a protein, in this case, adenylate kinase, that have their amino acids rearranged. The library of mutant proteins was then mined for variants that retained the ability to function by introducing them into Escherichia coli bacteria.
Libraries are particularly useful for scientists who study the rules governing the adaptation of proteins during molecular evolution; they also are useful for designing biosensors and molecular switches with novel functions for synthetic biology, according to the authors.
Creating such a library has traditionally required painstaking processes, said Silberg, an assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Rice.
"Existing methods for rearranging the bits of information in a protein are slow and arduous to use," he said. "In addition, they are non-ideal because they simultaneously create multiple types of mutations, the desired rearrangements and undesired deletions of important amino acids.
"But with our method, you only generate mutants with rearranged sequences, and you don't need to be an expert in biomolecular engineering. All you need is the DNA that encodes your gene of interest, the artificial minitransposon we engineered and an enzyme. Mix them all together and you get a library of every possible variant.
"It's a way of making, with great control, all of the diversity of this type o
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| Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University Source:Eurekalert |