Trypsin Sensitivity Assay to Study the Folding Status of Proteins

Abstract

This protocol aims to evaluate folding status of proteins, utilizing trypsin sensitivity. Unfolded/misfolded proteins are more susceptible to trypsin than folded proteins, because trypsin easily accesses and cleaves loosely folded parts of proteins. This method is especially useful to compare tightness of the folding among wild-type and mutant proteins. As trypsin generally cleaves a peptide bond at the carboxyl-terminal side of the amino acids lysine or arginine, this method can be used to analyze the folding status of different types of proteins such as integral membrane or soluble proteins (Ninagawa et al., 2015) and is applicable to cell lysates of any species and tissues as well as to recombinant proteins. You can use this technique with regular molecular and cell biology equipment.