PSS

PSS engineers water‑soluble α‑helical transmembrane proteins by applying the QTY/NTY amino‑acid substitution codes to enhance solubility while preserving native transmembrane helical structure.

Key Features:

• QTY/NTY Methodology: Implements the QTY and NTY amino‑acid substitution codes to replace hydrophobic residues with more polar residues to increase solubility while aiming to maintain α‑helical transmembrane conformation.
• Simple Design Model: Generates individual protein designs with typical computation times of approximately 2–4 minutes depending on target size and complexity.
• Library Design Module: Produces comprehensive variant libraries for targets with multiple transmembrane helices with typical computation times of approximately 2–5 hours.
• Protocols for Experimental Implementation: Provides protocols that describe how to apply QTY/NTY substitutions experimentally to translate designed sequences into biochemical studies.

Scientific Applications:

• Membrane protein solubility enhancement: Produces soluble variants of α‑helical transmembrane proteins to facilitate downstream biochemical and biophysical characterization.
• GPCR expression and purification: Enables design of water‑soluble variants of G‑protein coupled receptors to aid expression and purification for functional and structural studies.
• Experimental studies of membrane protein function: Supports generation of variants that can accelerate experimental workflows for probing biological roles of membrane proteins.

Methodology:

Performs systematic sequence design using the QTY/NTY codes to substitute specific amino acids, supported by computational algorithms to generate soluble transmembrane α‑helical variants while aiming to preserve native conformation.