Shedding light on ORAI1 channel with genetic code expansion
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Updated: Jul 30, 2025

Super-Resolution Imaging of Bacterial Secreted Proteins Using Genetic Code Expansion
Published on: February 10, 2023
Sher Ali1, Guolin Ma2, Yubin Zhou2
1Center for Translational Cancer Research, Institute of Biosciences and Technology, Texas A&M University, Houston, TX, 77030, United States of America.
Abstract:
Genetic code expansion technology has been widely applied to control protein activity and biological systems by taking advantage of an amber stop codon suppressor tRNA and orthogonal aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase pair. With this chemical biology approach, Maltan et al. incorporated photocrosslinking unnatural amino acids (UAAs) into the transmembrane domains of ORAI1 to enable UV light-inducible calcium influx across the plasma membrane, mechanistic interrogation of the calcium release-activated calcium (CRAC) channel at the single amino acid level, and remote control of downstream calcium-modulated signaling in mammalian cells.
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