| Language: | English |
|---|---|
| Type: | Article |
| Authors: | Miho Yanagisawa, Masayuki Iwamoto, Ayako Kato, Kenichi Yoshikawa and Shigetoshi Oiki |
| Journal: | Journal of the American Chemical Society |
| Volume: | 133 |
| Number: | 30 |
| Month: | 8 |
| Year: | 2011 |
| Actual year: | 2011 |
| Pages: | 11774-11779 |
| doi: | 10.1021/ja2040859 |
| Abstract: | We report a method for the successful reconstitution of the KcsA potassium channel with either an outside-out or inside-out orientation in giant unilamellar vesicles, using droplet-transfer technique. The procedure is rather simple. First, we prepared water-in-oil droplets lined with a lipid monolayer. When solubilized KcsA was encapsulated in the droplet, it accumulated at monolayers of phosphatidylglycerol (PG) and phosphoethanolamine (PE), but not at a monolayer of phosphatidylcholine (PC). The droplet was then transferred through an oil/water interface having a preformed monolayer. The interface monolayer covered the droplet so as to generate a bilayer vesicle. By creating chemically different lipid-monolayers at the droplet and oil/water interface, we obtained vesicles with asymmetric lipid compositions in the outer and inner leaflets. KcsA was spontaneously inserted into vesicles from the inside or outside, and this was accelerated in vesicles that contained PE or PG. Integrated insertion into the vesicle membrane and the KcsA orientation was examined by functional assay, exploiting the pH sensitivity of the opening of the KcsA when the pH-sensitive cytoplasmic domain (CPD) faces toward acidic media. KcsA loaded from the inside of the PG-containing vesicles becomes permeable only when the intra-vesicular pH is acidic, and the KcsA loaded from the outside becomes permeable when the extravesicular pH is acidic. Therefore, the internal or external insertion of KcsA leads to an outside-out or inside-out configuration so as to retain its hydrophilic CPD in the added aqueous side. The CPD-truncated KcsA exhibited a random orientation, supporting the idea that the CPD determines the orientation. Further application of the droplet-transfer method is promising for the reconstitution of other types of membrane proteins with a desired orientation into cell-sized vesicles with a targeted lipid composition of the outer and inner leaflets. |
Miho Yanagisawa, Masayuki Iwamoto, Ayako Kato, Kenichi Yoshikawa and Shigetoshi Oiki, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 133, 11774-11779 (2011)