This approach is scalable across diverse species and metabolites. We hope it will help systematically annotate sensor proteins and improve our ability to predict ligand specificity.
Link to a paper "A pooled screening approach reveals bacterial chemoreceptors for short-chain carboxylic acids":
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Excited to share another latest work on bacterial chemoreceptors!
We developed a high-throughput approach to functionally screen ~1,000 chemoreceptors in non-model bacteria, addressing a challenge in linking receptors to their ligands.
We performed computational structural analyses to gain mechanistic insight into the ligand specificity.
Enriched receptors exhibit ~3× larger ligand-binding pockets compared to a recently reported formate receptor.
This work was led by a former postdoc Hiroya Oka, along with Dung Mai, Sora Yu, Nicolas Grosjean, Zong-Yen Wu, Nam Pham, David Robinson, Yasuo Yoshikuni, Nigel Mouncey at @jgi.doe.gov
I gratefully acknowledge a LDRD program to fund this project at @berkeleylab.lbl.gov
We identified a group of chemoreceptors in Pseudomonas that mediate chemotaxis toward short-chain carboxylic acids.
Below is an example of enrichment assay using soft-agar with lactate: cells expressing the library (right) show increased expansion.