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RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies

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For Public

To let you know about our research, this area contains 4 types of information about CLST; “Article”, “Videos”, “Event” and “Study”.
At “Article”, you can read articles on interviews and lectures, and you can enjoy the videos about CLST at “Videos”. If you want to meet and talk directly with the researcher, “Visit” give you some information of such events. You can find more difficult contents to know about our research deeply at “Study”.
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  • Study

Technologies of CLST

Production and Crystallization of Membrane Proteins

 

 

Membrane proteins play indispensable roles in the living cells, such as receptors for signal transduction across the cell membrane, solute transporters, ion channels, and so on, thus many of them have been drug discovery targets. However, since the handling of membrane proteins is very difficult, all the processes of overexpression, protein purification, crystallization and structural analysis are challenging. Protein Functional and Structural Biology Team has been developing techniques to clear those difficulties one by one. In particular, we are improving the cell-free protein synthesis technique optimized for membrane proteins, which can be applied for membrane proteins which failed to be overexpressed in the cell-based expression systems. We are also improving the in meso crystallization method for membrane proteins and have been developing the automated dispensing robot for membrane protein crystallization. Using these technologies, we succeeded in determining the crystal structures of cell-free synthesized membrane proteins. It is expected that the structural information of membrane proteins in atomic resolution dramatically promotes the development of drug discovery.

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Related labs

CLST was reorganized into three centers according to the RIKEN 4th Medium-Term Plan from April 1, 2018.