A fully functional surface-tethered protein switch has been reported by US scientists. It is the first step towards a universal biosensor platform, they claim.
Peter Searson, at John Hopkins University, Baltimore, and colleagues attached a protein switch with a maltose binding protein input domain and a beta-lactamase output domain to a gold surface. When maltose bound to the input domain, it switched on the beta-lactamase’s activity, which the team measured using the yellow-to-red colour change that took place as it hydrolysed the beta-lactam ring in nitrocefin. Different input domains could be coupled to the same output domain, offering a potential route to a universal biosensing platform.
Read Surface-tethered protein switches, recently published as an Advance article in ChemComm.
