Probing unnatural amino acid integration into enhanced green fluorescent protein by genetic code expansion with a high-throughput screening platform

BACKGROUND: Genetic code expansion has developed into an elegant tool to incorporate unnatural amino acids (uAA) at predefined sites in the protein backbone in response to an amber codon. However, recombinant production and yield of uAA comprising proteins are challenged due to the additional translation machinery required for uAA incorporation. RESULTS: We developed a microtiter plate-based high-throughput monitoring system (HTMS) to study and optimize uAA integration in the model protein enhanced green fluorescence protein (eGFP). Two uAA, propargyl-L-lysine (Plk) and (S)-2-amino-6-((2-azidoethoxy) carbonylamino) hexanoic acid (Alk), were incorporated at the same site into eGFP co-expressing the native PylRS/tRNA(Pyl)(CUA) pair originating from Methanosarcina barkeri in E. coli. The site-specific uAA functionalization was confirmed by LC-MS/MS analysis. uAA-eGFP production and biomass growth in parallelized E. coli cultivations was correlated to (i) uAA concentration and the (ii) time of uAA addition to the expression medium as well as to induction parameters including the (iii) time and (iv) amount of IPTG supplementation. The online measurements of the HTMS were consolidated by end point-detection using standard enzyme-linked immunosorbent procedures. CONCLUSION: The developed HTMS is powerful tool for parallelized and rapid screening. In light of uAA integration, future applications may include parallelized screening of different PylRS/tRNA(Pyl)(CUA) pairs as well as further optimization of culture conditions. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13036-016-0031-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.