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Updated: Jul 16, 2026

Mutagenesis and Functional Analysis of Ion Channels Heterologously Expressed in Mammalian Cells
Published on: October 1, 2010
Functional expression of mammalian receptors and membrane channels in different cells
Nora Eifler1, Myriam Duckely, Lazar T Sumanovski
1Maurice E. Müller Institute for Microscopy, Biozentrum, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 70, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland.
Abstract:
In native tissues, the majority of medically important membrane proteins is only present at low concentrations, making their overexpression in recombinant systems a prerequisite for structural studies. Here, we explore the commonly used eukaryotic expression systems-yeast, baculovirus/insect cells (Sf9) and Semliki Forest Virus (SFV)/mammalian cells-for the expression of seven different eukaryotic membrane proteins from a variety of protein families. The expression levels, quality, biological activity, localization and solubility of all expressed proteins are compared in order to identify the advantages of one system over the other. SFV-transfected mammalian cell lines provide the closest to native environment for the expression of mammalian membrane proteins, and they exhibited the best overall performance. But depending on the protein, baculovirus-infected Sf9 cells performed almost as well as mammalian cells. The lowest expression levels for the proteins tested here were obtained in yeast.
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