Construction of Model Lipid Membranes Incorporating G-protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs)

This protocol utilizes agarose swelling as a powerful and generalizable technique for incorporating integral membrane proteins (IMPs) into giant unilamellar lipid vesicles (GUVs), as described here for the reconstitution of the human 1A serotonin receptor protein (5-HT_1AR), one of the classes of pharmacologically important G protein-coupled receptors.