G-protein coupled receptors are membrane proteins that play an important part in cellular signal transduction. Solving the three dimensional structures of these proteins is critical and is becoming viable lately. However the biggest bottleneck in obtaining sufficient quantities of the pure protein is that GPCRs are conformationally flexible, and hence aggregate at higher concentrations during purification. A solution to this challenge is to derive thermostable mutants of GPCRs that are amenable to purification techniques. However the experiments involved in identifying the residue positions that lead to thermostability as well as the thermostable mutants is both expensive and time consuming. There are about 300 mutations that need to be done just to be able to identify positions that lead to thermostability. Our goal is to develop a fast computational screening method, LITiConDesign to design and thermally stable mutants of several GPCRs. We will target class A GPCRs in their agonist and antagonist bound structures. This project is in collaboration with Dr. Chris Tate (MRC, Cambridge, UK) and Dr. Reinhard Grisshammer (NINDS).

Publications related to this project:

• Balaraman, G., Bhattacharya, S., and Vaidehi, N., 2010, Structural insights into conformational stability of wild type and mutant β1-adrenergic receptor, BioPhys. J., 99(2):568-77.