Many useful proteins — including those that make up the King Lab’s nanoparticle vaccine platform — must be secreted from cells, but this can prove difficult. In a new paper appearing in PNAS, a team led by King Lab postdoctoral scholars John Wang and Alena Khmelinskaia developed a new computer program called Degreaser which can identify and remove hidden transmembrane sequences that hinder secretion.
The team showed that Degreaser can improve the secretion of existing nanoparticles without reducing their stability. They also used Degreaser to create new nanoparticles that secrete as well as natural ones. This new program and the improved nanoparticles could be useful in medicine and biotechnology.
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Improving the secretion of designed protein assemblies through negative design of cryptic transmembrane domains (Open Access)