ERC Advanced Grant MaCChines: Molecular machines based on coiled-coil protein origami; Principal investigator: prof. dr. Roman Jerala
The aim of MaCChines is to advance design of modular proteins based on coiled-coil building modules (Coiled-coil protein origami CCPO) and take advantage of the unique properties of this platform. This type of de novo designed proteins are defined by the sequence of coiled-coil (CC) dimer-forming modules that are concatenated by flexible linkers into a single polypeptide chain that self-assembles into a polyhedral cage based on pairwise CC interactions (Gradišar et al., NatChemBiol 2013; Ljubetić, Lapenta et al., NatBiotech 2017).
These programmable molecules have many properties - they can be produced by cell factories in an energy- and resource-effective and sustainable manner, due to their structure defined at the nanoscale we can expect them to be efficient in recognition, delivery, and catalysis and to find applications in medicine, biotechnology and other fields.
The objective of MaCChines is to build foundations of a new branch of protein design strategy, develop and exploit unique features of de novo designed coiled-coil protein origami (CCPO), in order to enable new drug delivery technologies, construction of complex nanoscaffolds, new materials, sensors, rational design of molecular machines and new advanced therapeutics.
Results
Within the first half of the project we can report advances on several exciting directions along the proposed directions of the ERC AdG MaCChines project and also along some new ideas that have been conceived and realized during this project.
Several types of functionalized CC modules were developed and implemented:
- New metal and pH dependent coiled—coil modules (Aupič in sod., ChemBioChem 2018)
- Fusion of CC modules with split proteases to generate fast responsive cellular logic (Fink et al., Nat.Chem.Biol. 2019)
- Application of CC modules for modulation of localization and regulation of biochemical/biological processes (Lebar et al., Nat. Chem. Biol. 2019)
- Metal ion-regulated assembly of designed modular protein cages (Aupič et al., Sci. Adv. 2022)
- Cell regulation by segmentation strategy of de novo designed four-helical bundles (Merljak et al., Nat. Comm. 2023)
- CC-liquid-liquid phase separated condensates in mammalian cells (Ramšak et al., Nat. Comm. 2023)
We introduced several new strategies of CCPO assembly and characterisation:
- Multichain CCPO assembly (Lapenta et al., Nat.Comm. 2021)
- Design of the designed protein folding pathway and use of multiple copies of the same type of the CC peptide (Aupič et al., Nat.Comm. 2021)
- Characterization, crystal structure determination of nanobodies binding to designed CC modules and their binding to diverse CCPO polyhedra (Majerle et al., PNAS 2021)
- Crystal structure of de novo designed CC protein origami triangle (Satler et al., JACS 2023)
Designed coiled-coil peptides were applied for tethering of Cas9 and exonuclease in a noncovalent manner, which significantly improved the efficiency of gene inactivation with potential applications in medicine, agriculture, biotechnology. We filed a patent application: Coiled-coil mediated tethering of CRISPR-CAS and exonucleases for enhanced genome editing: European Patent Application EP19192490.1, 2019-08-20. München: European Patent Office. This invention was the foundation of the ERC PoC project CCEdit, the findings of which were published in Lainšček et al., Nat.Comm. 2022.
Equipment
Cryo electron microscope Glacios has been co-funded within project MaCChines from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation.
Principal investigator prof. dr. Roman Jerala
ERC MaCChines Team dr. Helena Gradišar, dr. Ajasja Ljubetič, dr. Arvind Kumar Gupta, dr. Weijun Zhou, dr. Fabio Lapenta, dr. Žiga Strmšek, Maruša Ramšak, Sara Vidmar, Hana Esih, Jaka Snoj, Klemen Mezgec, Tadej Satler.
Acronym MaCChines
Project ID 787115
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 787115).