Browsing by Subject "Noncanonical amino acids"

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    Ancestral archaea expanded the genetic code with pyrrolysine
    (Elsevier, 2022) Guo, Li-Tao; Amikura, Kazuaki; Jiang, Han-Kai; Mukai, Takahito; Fu, Xian; Wang, Yane-Shih; O’Donoghue, Patrick; Söll, Dieter; Tharp, Jeffery M.; Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, School of Medicine
    The pyrrolysyl-tRNA synthetase (PylRS) facilitates the cotranslational installation of the 22nd amino acid pyrrolysine. Owing to its tolerance for diverse amino acid substrates, and its orthogonality in multiple organisms, PylRS has emerged as a major route to install noncanonical amino acids into proteins in living cells. Recently, a novel class of PylRS enzymes was identified in a subset of methanogenic archaea. Enzymes within this class (ΔPylSn) lack the N-terminal tRNA-binding domain that is widely conserved amongst PylRS enzymes, yet remain active and orthogonal in bacteria and eukaryotes. In this study, we use biochemical and in vivo UAG-readthrough assays to characterize the aminoacylation efficiency and substrate spectrum of a ΔPylSn class PylRS from the archaeon Candidatus Methanomethylophilus alvus. We show that, compared with the full-length enzyme from Methanosarcina mazei, the Ca. M. alvus PylRS displays reduced aminoacylation efficiency but an expanded amino acid substrate spectrum. To gain insight into the evolution of ΔPylSn enzymes, we performed molecular phylogeny using 156 PylRS and 105 pyrrolysine tRNA (tRNAPyl) sequences from diverse archaea and bacteria. This analysis suggests that the PylRS•tRNAPyl pair diverged before the evolution of the three domains of life, placing an early limit on the evolution of the Pyl-decoding trait. Furthermore, our results document the coevolutionary history of PylRS and tRNAPyl and reveal the emergence of tRNAPyl sequences with unique A73 and U73 discriminator bases. The orthogonality of these tRNAPyl species with the more common G73-containing tRNAPyl will enable future efforts to engineer PylRS systems for further genetic code expansion.
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    Split aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases for proximity-induced stop codon suppression
    (National Academy of Science, 2023) Jiang, Han-Kai; Ambrose, Nicole L.; Chung, Christina Z.; Wang, Yane-Shih; Söll, Dieter; Tharp, Jeffery M.; Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, School of Medicine
    Synthetic biology tools for regulating gene expression have many useful biotechnology and therapeutic applications. Most tools developed for this purpose control gene expression at the level of transcription, and relatively few methods are available for regulating gene expression at the translational level. Here, we design and engineer split orthogonal aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (o-aaRS) as unique tools to control gene translation in bacteria and mammalian cells. Using chemically induced dimerization domains, we developed split o-aaRSs that mediate gene expression by conditionally suppressing stop codons in the presence of the small molecules rapamycin and abscisic acid. By activating o-aaRSs, these molecular switches induce stop codon suppression, and in their absence stop codon suppression is turned off. We demonstrate, in Escherichia coli and in human cells, that split o-aaRSs function as genetically encoded AND gates where stop codon suppression is controlled by two distinct molecular inputs. In addition, we show that split o-aaRSs can be used as versatile biosensors to detect therapeutically relevant protein-protein interactions, including those involved in cancer, and those that mediate severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 infection.