The principal aim of this project is to apply a novel synthetic biology approach to develop protein expression strains of the laboratory bacterium Escherichia coli that are suitable for producing functional G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) proteins.
GPCRs are diverse membrane proteins that are ubiquitous in the human body. They are involved in many physiological processes as well as many diseases and have been the most important drug targets in modern medicine. Efficient production of milligram quantities of functional GPCR is currently very difficult. Although E. coli is widely used for protein production, expressing functional GPCRs in E. coli is still challenging.
The novel E. coli expression host to be developed in this project will ignificantly accelerate the production of GPCRs and drug development work with this important class of human proteins. This project will not only have a broad impact in drug discovery across many diseases but also will provide the scientific community a valuable resource for structural biology research.
Contact PI: Xu, Karen.
