Open AccessRational design and implementation of a chemically inducible heterotrimerization system
Author(s) -
Helen D. Wu,
Masaki Kikuchi,
Onur Dağliyan,
Adam K. Aragaki,
Hideki Nakamura,
Nikolay V. Dokholyan,
Takashi Umehara,
Takanari Inoue
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
nature methods
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 19.469
H-Index - 318
eISSN - 1548-7105
pISSN - 1548-7091
DOI - 10.1038/s41592-020-0913-x
Subject(s) - fkbp , chemical biology , computational biology , membrane , chemistry , microbiology and biotechnology , biophysics , membrane protein , synthetic biology , biology , biochemistry
Chemically inducible dimerization (CID) uses a small molecule to induce binding of two different proteins. CID tools such as the FK506-binding protein-FKBP-rapamycin-binding- (FKBP-FRB)-rapamycin system have been widely used to probe molecular events inside and outside cells. While various CID tools are available, chemically inducible trimerization (CIT) does not exist, due to inherent challenges in designing a chemical that simultaneously binds three proteins with high affinity and specificity. Here, we developed CIT by rationally splitting FRB and FKBP. Cellular and structural datasets showed efficient trimerization of split pairs of FRB or FKBP with full-length FKBP or FRB, respectively, by rapamycin. CIT rapidly induced tri-organellar junctions and perturbed intended membrane lipids exclusively at select membrane contact sites. By conferring one additional condition to what is achievable with CID, CIT expands the types of manipulation in single live cells to address cell biology questions otherwise intractable and engineer cell functions for future synthetic biology applications.