西亚试剂：A protein engineered to bind uranyl selecively and with fem

Lu Zhou, Mike Bosscher, Changsheng Zhang, Salih Özçubukçu, Liang Zhang, Wen Zhang,Charles J. Li, Jianzhao Liu, Mark P. Jensen, Luhua Lai & Chuan He

Uranyl (UO22+), the predominant aerobic form of uranium, is present in the ocean at a concentration of ~3.2 parts per 109 (13.7 nM); however, the successful enrichment of uranyl from this vast resource has been limited by the high concentrations of metal ions of similar size and charge, which makes it difficult to design a binding motif that is selective for uranyl. Here we report the design and rational development of a uranyl-binding protein using a computational screening process in the initial search for potential uranyl-binding sites. The engineered protein is thermally stable and offers very high affinity and selectivity for uranyl with a Kd of 7.4 femtomolar (fM) and >10,000-fold selectivity over other metal ions. We also demonstrated that the uranyl-binding protein can repeatedly sequester 30–60% of the uranyl in synthetic sea water. The chemical strategy employed here may be applied to engineer other selective metal-binding proteins for biotechnology and remediation applications.

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