News and Views article discusses our creation of an artificial pathway using SIMPLEx
Dario Mizrachi's recent paper was the feature of a News and Views article in Nature Chemical Biology authored by Kalistyn Burley and Celia Goulding. The article, entitled "Protein Engineering: Redirecting Protein Machinery," describes our efforts to design a water-soluble variant of the integral membrane protein DsbB that is able to catalyze disulfide-bond formation in the Escherichia coli cytoplasm. Burley and Goulding additionally point out that our approach may allow exploration of other membrane protein complexes involved in electron-transfer-dependent reactions that are thought to be functional only within the membrane environment, such as cytochrome c oxidase. They speculate that our protein-redirecting strategy could also enable more tractable use of important membrane protein drug targets in small-molecule high-throughput inhibitor screens, which are usually hampered by the presence of detergents. They also point out that our technology may be leveraged to expedite structure determination of membrane proteins by cry-electron microscopy.
You can download our paper here:
or read more about the work in the related Cornell Chronicle article: