Target selection of soluble protein complexes for structural proteomics studies

BACKGROUND: Protein expression in E. coli is the most commonly used system to produce protein for structural studies, because it is fast and inexpensive and can produce large quantity of proteins. However, when proteins from other species such as mammalian are produced in this system, problems of protein expression and solubility arise [1]. Structural genomics project are currently investigating proteomics pipelines that would produce sufficient quantities of recombinant proteins for structural studies of protein complexes. To investigate how the E. coli protein expression system could be used for this purpose, we purified apoptotic binary protein complexes formed between members of the Caspase Associated Recruitment Domain (CARD) family. RESULTS: A combinatorial approach to the generation of protein complexes was performed between members of the CARD domain protein family that have the ability to form hetero-dimers between each other. In our method, each gene coding for a specific protein partner is cloned in pET-28b (Novagen) and PGEX2T (Amersham) expression vectors. All combinations of protein complexes are then obtained by reconstituting complexes from purified components in native conditions, after denaturation-renaturation or co-expression. Our study applied to 14 soluble CARD domain proteins revealed that co-expression studies perform better than native and denaturation-renaturation methods. In this study, we confirm existing interactions obtained in vivoin mammalian cells and also predict new interactions. CONCLUSION: The simplicity of this screening method could be easily scaled up to identify soluble protein complexes for structural genomic projects. This study reports informative statistics on the solubility of human protein complexes expressed in E.coli belonging to the human CARD protein family.