Department of Biotechnology
inStem (Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine)

Combining cysteine scanning with chemical labeling to map protein-protein interactions and infer bound structure in an intrinsically disordered region.

Publication Type

Journal Article

Date of Publication

January 1, 2022

Journal

Frontiers in molecular biosciences

Volume/Issue

9

ISSN

2296-889X

The genome harbours nine toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems of the mazEF family. These consist of two proteins, a toxin and an antitoxin, encoded in an operon. While the toxin has a conserved fold, the antitoxins are structurally diverse and the toxin binding region is typically intrinsically disordered before binding. We describe high throughput methodology for accurate mapping of interfacial residues and apply it to three MazEF complexes. The method involves screening one partner protein against a panel of chemically masked single cysteine mutants of its interacting partner, displayed on the surface of yeast cells. Such libraries have much lower diversity than those generated by saturation mutagenesis, simplifying library generation and data analysis. Further, because of the steric bulk of the masking reagent, labeling of virtually all exposed epitope residues should result in loss of binding, and buried residues are inaccessible to the labeling reagent. The binding residues are deciphered by probing the loss of binding to the labeled cognate partner by flow cytometry. Using this methodology, we have identified the interfacial residues for MazEF3, MazEF6 and MazEF9 TA systems of . In the case of MazEF9, where a crystal structure was available, there was excellent agreement between our predictions and the crystal structure, superior to those with AlphaFold2. We also report detailed biophysical characterization of the MazEF3 and MazEF9 TA systems and measured the relative affinities between cognate and non-cognate toxin-antitoxin partners in order to probe possible cross-talk between these systems.

Alternate Journal

Front Mol Biosci

PubMed ID

36275627

PubMed Central ID

PMC9585320

Authors

Shahbaz Ahmed
Gopinath Chattopadhyay
Kavyashree Manjunath
Munmun Bhasin
Neelam Singh
Mubashir Rasool
Sayan Das
Varsha Rana
Neha Khan
Debarghya Mitra
Aparna Asok
Ramandeep Singh
Raghavan Varadarajan