Stabilizing membrane proteins

Abstract

Membrane proteins can be extremely stable in a bilayer environment, but are often unstable and rapidly lose activity after detergent solubilization. Poor stability can preclude the detailed characterization of many membrane proteins. One way to alleviate this problem is to find more stable mutants of a membrane protein of interest. This approach is made tractable by the finding that stability-enhancing mutations appear to be relatively common in membrane proteins.