Novel protein switches for biosensing and bioactivity regulation
Some natural protein domains sense specific input signals to make conformational changes, which inspired researchers to devise novel protein switches that can act as biosensors or regulators. One strategy of building such switches is based on the phenomenon of allostery, in which the conformational changes at a remote regulatory site can be propagated through to the active site, thus modulating bioactivity in either a negative or positive fashion. A proof-of-principle protein switch was created by Guntas and Ostermeier (2004), which made advantage of two allosteric enzymes with prerequisite effector-binding and catalytic functionalities. TEM-1 BLA was randomly inserted into MBP to create a library of approximately 20,000 fusions. After screening the bifunctional library members, they identified two switch proteins whose BLA activity could be modulated by the presence of maltose, and one of them displayed a 70% increase in kcat and an 80% increase in kcat/Km. Similarly, Meister and Joshi (2013) developed a switch by inserting the calmodulin domain (CaM) into BLA, taking advantage of the ability of CaM to change its conformation upon binding to peptide and ligands. The resulting allosteric enzyme showed an up to 120-fold increase in catalytic activity of the activated state compared with the inactive state. A more sophisticated example is the construction of proTeOn and proTeOff systems for controlling target gene expression in Escherichia coli as described by Volzing et al. (2011). Two protein devices that have switch-like features were built by fusing an inducible DNA-binding protein domain TetR (the tetracycline repressor) or rTetR (reverse-TetR) with the lux operon's transcription activation domain LuxR∆N (N-terminal truncation mutant of LuxR) ( Fig. 3b). In the proTeOn device, rTetR is unable to bind to the tetO operator in the absence of the inducer, anhydrotetracycline (aTc). Upon activation with aTc, rTetR undergoes a conformational change and binds tetO, allowing the fused LuxR∆N to bind the nearby luxbox sequence and thus upregulate the downstream gfp transcription. On the contrary, the proTeOff device involving TetR that behaves inversely from rTetR activates gfp expression only in the absence of aTc. As illustrated in this example, gene expression can be switched ON and OFF depending on the presence or absence of the inducer.