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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter April 20, 2019

19F NMR as a versatile tool to study membrane protein structure and dynamics

  • Dania Rose-Sperling , Mai Anh Tran , Luca M. Lauth , Benedikt Goretzki and Ute A. Hellmich ORCID logo EMAIL logo
From the journal Biological Chemistry

Abstract

To elucidate the structures and dynamics of membrane proteins, highly advanced biophysical methods have been developed that often require significant resources, both for sample preparation and experimental analyses. For very complex systems, such as membrane transporters, ion channels or G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), the incorporation of a single reporter at a select site can significantly simplify the observables and the measurement/analysis requirements. Here we present examples using 19F nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy as a powerful, yet relatively straightforward tool to study (membrane) protein structure, dynamics and ligand interactions. We summarize methods to incorporate 19F labels into proteins and discuss the type of information that can be readily obtained for membrane proteins already from relatively simple NMR spectra with a focus on GPCRs as the membrane protein family most extensively studied by this technique. In the future, these approaches may be of particular interest also for many proteins that undergo complex functional dynamics and/or contain unstructured regions and thus are not amenable to X-ray crystallography or cryo electron microscopy (cryoEM) studies.

Acknowledgments

We apologize to all authors whose work was not cited due to length restrictions. D.R.-S. acknowledges a PhD fellowship from the Hans-Böckler-Foundation and B.G. a PhD fellowship from the Max Planck Graduate Centre (MPGC) at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. This work was supported by the Carl-Zeiss foundation, the Fulbright-Cottrell Award funded by the German-American Fulbright Foundation, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) and the Bundesministerium für Forschung und Bildung (BMBF), the Center of Biomolecular Magnetic Resonance (BMRZ) at the Goethe University Frankfurt funded by the state of Hesse and the LOEWE Main Research Focus DynaMem, funded by the state of Hesse within the framework of the Hessian Initiative for Scientific and Economic Excellence (LOEWE).

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Received: 2018-12-20
Accepted: 2019-04-17
Published Online: 2019-04-20
Published in Print: 2019-10-25

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