Arginine-rich Peptides Can Actively Mediate Liquid-liquid Phase Separation

Steven Boeynaems; Mathias De Decker; Peter Tompa; Ludo Van Den Bosch

doi:10.21769/BioProtoc.2525

Arginine-rich Peptides Can Actively Mediate Liquid-liquid Phase Separation

Bio Protoc. 2017 Sep 5;7(17):e2525. doi: 10.21769/BioProtoc.2525.

Authors

Steven Boeynaems^{1

2

3}, Mathias De Decker^{1

2}, Peter Tompa^{4

5}, Ludo Van Den Bosch^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ KU Leuven-University of Leuven, Department of Neurosciences, Experimental Neurology and Leuven Research Institute for Neuroscience and Disease (LIND), Leuven, Belgium.
² VIB, Center for Brain and Disease Research, Laboratory of Neurobiology, Leuven, Belgium.
³ Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, USA.
⁴ VIB, Center for Structural Biology (CSB), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels, Belgium.
⁵ Institute of Enzymology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary.

Abstract

Studying liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) of proteins provides key insights into the biogenesis of membraneless organelles and pathological protein aggregation in disease. We have established a protocol for inducing the phase separation of arginine-rich peptides, which allows for studying their molecular determinants and dynamics ( Boeynaems et al., 2017 ).

Keywords: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; Arginine; C9orf72; LLPS; Mass spec; Peptides; Phase separation; Stress granule.