Title The robust self-assembling tubular nanostructures formed by gp053 from phage vb_ecom_fv3 /
Authors Šimoliūnas, Eugenijus ; Truncaitė, Lidija ; Rutkienė, Rasa ; Povilonienė, Simona ; Goda, Karolis ; Kaupinis, Algirdas ; Valius, Mindaugas ; Meškys, Rolandas
DOI 10.3390/v11010050
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Is Part of Viruses.. Basel : MDPI AG. 2019, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 7098-7140.. ISSN 1999-4915. eISSN 1999-4915
Keywords [eng] bacteriophage vB_EcoM_FV3 ; banotubular structures ; self-assembly ; tail sheath protein
Abstract [eng] The recombinant phage tail sheath protein, gp053, from Escherichia coli infecting myovirus vB_EcoM_FV3 (FV3) was able to self-assemble into long, ordered and extremely stable tubular structures (polysheaths) in the absence of other viral proteins. TEM observations revealed that those protein nanotubes varied in length (~10–1000 nm). Meanwhile, the width of the polysheaths (~28 nm) corresponded to the width of the contracted tail sheath of phage FV3. The formed protein nanotubes could withstand various extreme treatments including heating up to 100 ◦ C and high concentrations of urea. To determine the shortest variant of gp053 capable of forming protein nanotubes, a set of N-or/and C-truncated as well as poly-His-tagged variants of gp053 were constructed. The TEM analysis of these mutants showed that up to 25 and 100 amino acid residues could be removed from the N and C termini, respectively, without disturbing the process of self-assembly. In addition, two to six copies of the gp053 encoding gene were fused into one open reading frame. All the constructed oligomers of gp053 self-assembled in vitro forming structures of different regularity. By using the modification of cysteines with biotin, the polysheaths were tested for exposed thiol groups. Polysheaths formed by the wild-type gp053 or its mutants possess physicochemical properties, which are very attractive for the construction of self-assembling nanostructures with potential applications in different fields of nanosciences.
Published Basel : MDPI AG
Type Journal article
Language English
Publication date 2019