Team:UCLA/Notebook/Protein Cages/22 May 2015
Tyler Lee
Residues 10 and 12
Once our cage has been designed and purified, it will be necessary to experimentally verify that the cage properly forms and breaks when exposed to thrombin. As of now, our group plans on using dynamic light scattering and conjugation of fluorescent markers to verify these occurrences. I began investigating the inner structure of the cage to look for serine residues that could be swapped for cysteines to use in conjugation reactions. The premise of this experiment is such that the cage will properly form to sequester the inside residues from fluorescent conjugation molecules on the outside of the cage. only when exposed to thrombin will the cage break and allow access to the mutated inner residues containing cysteine, which will conjugate with fluorescent markers to allow easy visualization with a fluorescent microscope.