Abstract
G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are highly flexible and prone to denaturation during protein extraction in detergents and purification. This poses a huge challenge to purify a conformationally homogeneous solution of GPCRs. Thermostabilizing mutations have been used widely to purify and obtain crystal structures of several GPCRs. However, identifying thermostabilizing mutations for GPCRs remains a tedious and expensive task as they are not transferable even among closely related GPCRs. Additionally, the mutations stabilizing one conformational state of a GPCR do not always stabilize other conformational state(s) of the same GPCR. Previously we developed a computational method, LiticonDesign, for rapid prediction of thermostabilizing mutations for a specific GPCR conformation. In this study, we have used LiticonDesign to predict thermostabilizing mutations for the agonist bound active-intermediate state of the human adenosine receptor (A(2A)R) using the structure of the inactive state of the same GPCR and vice versa. Our study shows that the thermostable mutation predictions using LiticonDesign, for an active-intermediate state of a GPCR (A(2A)R in our case), requires a homology model that is derived from an active/active-intermediate state GPCR structure as a template. Similarly, the homology models derived from inactive state GPCR conformations are better in predicting the thermostable mutations for the inactive state of A(2A)R. Overall, LiticonDesign method is not only efficient in predicting thermostabilizing mutations for a given GPCR sequence but also can recover conformation specific mutations for a state of interest, if a suitable starting structure of desired conformation is chosen.