Structure Determination of Membrane Proteins Using X-Ray Crystallography

Abstract

Membrane proteins serve essential roles in all aspects of life and make up roughly one-third of all genomes from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. Their responsibilities include mediating cell signaling, nutrient import, waste export, cellular communication, trafficking, and immunity. For their critical role in many cellular processes, membrane proteins serve as targets for up to 50% of drugs currently on the market and remain primary targets in new therapeutics being developed. Despite their importance and abundance in nature, only ~1% of structures in the Protein Data Bank are of transmembrane proteins. This discrepancy can be directly attributed to the biochemical properties of membrane proteins and the difficulty in producing sufficient yields for structural studies or the difficulty in growing well-ordered crystals. Here, we present methods from our work that outline our general pipeline from cloning to structure determination of membrane proteins, with a focus on using X-ray crystallography, which still yields ~90% of all structures being deposited into the Protein Data Bank.