Plant cells regulate their metabolic activity in response to fluctuating environments, in part by changing the arrangement and interaction of organelles. This means that if we can manipulate the interactions of organelles, the plant can be engineered to have desirable metabolic activities. We recently developed the “organelle glue technique”, in which inter-organellar interactions are manipulated by using the multimerization property of fluorescent proteins. Using this technique, we established transformed plants with altered metabolic activity at the pathway level. Here, we review the current state of the organelle glue technique.
The thermostabilization of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), which are important drug targets, is a crucial challenge for structural analysis. We constructed a methodology for thermostabilizing a GPCR in the inactive state or the active state solely by multiple amino-acid mutations without the ligand binding. This method combines our recently developed theory based on statistical thermodynamics and the technique of site-directed saturation mutagenesis, which is frequently used in evolutionary molecular engineering. The methodology was illustrated for the serotonin 2A receptor and the adenosine A2A receptor, and we successfully obtained stabilized multiple mutants.
Schizorhodopsin (SzR) is a new family of light-driven inward proton-pumping rhodopsins discovered in the genomes of Asgard archaea. The genomic survey revealed the presence of SzR in a wide variety of environments including high-temperature waters. The X-ray crystallographic structure suggested that a convergent evolution occurred at the molecular level between SzR and xenorhodopsin, another inward proton-pumping rhodopsin. Interestingly, outward proton-pumping rhodopsin was converted to an inward proton pump by swapping only three residues in the retinal Schiff base region with corresponding ones of SzR, indicating the direction of proton transport is determined by this core region of rhodopsins.