Anna Rita Minafra, Puyan Rafii, Sofie Mossner, Farhad Bazgir, Doreen M Floss, Jens M Moll, Jürgen Scheller
The Journal of biological chemistry 2023 AugSynthetic biology has emerged as a useful technology for studying cytokine signal transduction. Recently, we described fully synthetic cytokine receptors to phenocopy trimeric receptors such as the death receptor Fas/CD95. Using a nanobody as an extracellular-binding domain for mCherry fused to the natural receptor's transmembrane and intracellular domain, trimeric mCherry ligands were able to induce cell death. Among the 17,889 single nucleotide variants in the SNP database for Fas, 337 represent missense mutations that functionally remained largely uncharacterized. Here, we developed a workflow for the Fas synthetic cytokine receptor system to functionally characterize missense SNPs within the transmembrane and intracellular domain of Fas. To validate our system, we selected five functionally assigned loss-of-function (LOF) polymorphisms and included 15 additional unassigned SNPs. Moreover, based on structural data, 15 gain-of-function or LOF candidate mutations were additionally selected. All 35 nucleotide variants were functionally investigated through cellular proliferation, apoptosis and caspases 3 and 7 cleavage assays. Collectively, our results showed that 30 variants resulted in partial or complete LOF, while five lead to a gain-of-function. In conclusion, we demonstrated that synthetic cytokine receptors are a suitable tool for functional SNPs/mutations characterization in a structured workflow. Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Anna Rita Minafra, Puyan Rafii, Sofie Mossner, Farhad Bazgir, Doreen M Floss, Jens M Moll, Jürgen Scheller. Synthetic receptor platform to identify loss-of-function single nucleotide variants and designed mutants in the death receptor Fas/CD95. The Journal of biological chemistry. 2023 Aug;299(8):104989
PMID: 37392849
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