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Protein Engineering, Vol. 14, No. 8, 573-582, August 2001
© 2001 Oxford University Press

Design, high-level expression, purification and characterization of soluble fragments of the hepatitis C virus NS3 RNA helicase suitable for NMR-based drug discovery methods and mechanistic studies

Jennifer J. Gesell1, Dingjiang Liu1, Vincent S. Madison, Thomas Hesson, Yu-Sen Wang, Patricia C. Weber and Daniel F. Wyss,2

1 These two authors contributed equally to this work. Department of Structural Chemistry, Schering-Plough Research Institute, 2015 Galloping Hill Road, Kenilworth, NJ 07033, USA

RNA helicases represent a family of enzymes that unwind double-stranded (ds) RNA in a nucleoside triphosphate (NTP)-dependent fashion and which are required in all aspects of cellular RNA metabolism and processing. The hepatitis C virus (HCV) non-structural 3 (NS3) protein possesses a serine protease activity in the N-terminal one-third, whereas RNA-stimulated NTPase and helicase activities reside in the C-terminal portion of the 631 amino acid residue bifunctional enzyme. The HCV NS3 RNA helicase is of key importance in the life cycle of HCV, which makes it a target for the development of therapeutics. However, neither the precise mechanism nor the substrate structure has been defined for this enzyme. For nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-based drug discovery methods and for mechanistic studies we engineered, prepared and characterized various truncated constructs of the 451-residue HCV NS3 RNA helicase. Our goal was to produce smaller fragments of the enzyme, which would be amenable to solution NMR techniques while retaining their native NTP and/or nucleic acid binding sites. Solution conditions were optimized to obtain high-quality heteronuclear NMR spectra of nitrogen-15 isotope-labeled constructs, which are typical of well-folded monomeric proteins. Moreover, NMR binding studies and functional data directly support the correct folding of these fragments.


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