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Membrane proteins are one of the most important drug targets in diagnosis and therapeutics. Indeed, half of small compound drugs target are membrane proteins, such as G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and ion channels1. Over the years, researchers have been working on biochemical, biophysical, and structural studies of membrane proteins to elucidate their structure and function2,3. Development of monoclonal antibodies against membrane proteins is also performed actively in order to accelerate functional and structural studies and to develop therapeutic and diagnostic applications4,5,6,7,8,9. All these studies require a large amount of high quality membrane proteins10. For example, several milligrams of purified membrane proteins with natural conformation are needed for antibody development. A much larger quantity of highly purified membrane proteins are required for X-ray crystallography. However, mass production of membrane proteins remains a bottleneck in membrane protein research11. Membrane proteins have complicated structures with one or more transmembrane helices and play important roles in cell homeostasis. Heterologous overexpression of membrane proteins leads to multiple obstacles such as aggregation of membrane proteins that accumulate at high local concentrations or disturbance of cellular signal pathways. Even if the expression is successful, subsequent steps of sample preparation also face difficulty. For instance, preparation of proteoliposome, requires high-level skills and professional experiences in solubilization, purification, and stabilization of membrane proteins, and costs much effort and time as well12,13.
On the other hand, some advanced technologies have emerged in recent decades to produce proteins without the use of living cells14,15,16,17,18. Cell-free protein synthesis technology reconstitutes translation reaction in a test tube. Since there are no limitations that the cellular expression system has, cell-free systems have potential to synthesize a variety of proteins that are difficult to express or show toxicity in cells. Purified cell extract or reconstituted translational machinery is mixed with template mRNAs, amino acids, and energy sources, and recombinant proteins are synthesized in a short time. Regarding the membrane protein synthesis, some kinds of scaffolds composed of lipids or amphiphiles, such as liposomes, bicelles, nanodiscs, or copolymers are added to the cell-free reaction19,20,21,22,23,24. Synthesized membrane proteins interact with the scaffolds and can be stabilized in water. Cell-free synthesized membrane proteins are used widely in functional studies and antibody production25,26,27,28,29,30,31.
In this protocol, we describe an efficient cell-free method of proteoliposome production using wheat cell-free system and liposomes. Wheat cell-free protein synthesis system is a powerful in vitro translation system using extract from wheat germ15,32,33. Wheat germ contains a large amount of translational machinery and few translation inhibitors. The translational machinery in wheat, a member of eukaryotes, is suitable for translating eukaryotic proteins, and its translation efficiency is hardly affected by codon usage of the template mRNA. Using wheat cell-free system, we have synthesized a variety of proteins including protein kinases34,35, ubiquitin ligases36, transcription factors37, and membrane proteins with high success rates. For membrane protein production, we add lipid vesicle liposome into the translation mixture as scaffold19,38. Hydrophobic domains of membrane protein interact with lipid bilayer and are spontaneously integrated with liposome. Density gradient centrifugation is used to strictly separate proteoliposome from endogenous wheat proteins, even though a common centrifugation of the translation reaction mixture is sufficient for a simple purification of proteoliposome20. Many kinds of integral membrane proteins have been synthesized using wheat cell-free system and applied for various researches and developments25,38,39,40,41,42,43,44. Moreover, we developed the “bilayer-dialysis method” for large scale production45,46. In this method, cup-type dialysis device is immersed in the substrate feeding buffer, and two layers of translation reaction mixture and substrate feeding buffer are formed in the cup as shown in Figure 1. Continuous supply of substrates and removal of the byproduct can be efficiently conducted at both the top and the bottom of the reaction mixture for a long time, which leads to excellent translation efficacy (Figure 2A and Figure 2B)45.