Engineering G protein‐coupled receptors for stabilization

Abstract

G protein‐coupled receptors (GPCRs) are one of the most important families of targets for drug discovery. One of the limiting steps in the study of GPCRs has been their stability, with significant and time‐consuming protein engineering often used to stabilize GPCRs for structural characterization and drug screening. Unfortunately, computational methods developed using globular soluble proteins have translated poorly to the rational engineering of GPCRs. To fill this gap, we propose GPCR‐tm, a novel and personalized structurally driven web‐based machine learning tool to study the impacts of mutations on GPCR stability. We show that GPCR‐tm performs as well as or better than alternative methods, and that it can accurately rank the stability changes of a wide range of mutations occurring in various types of class A GPCRs. GPCR‐tm achieved Pearson's correlation coefficients of 0.74 and 0.46 on 10‐fold cross‐validation and blind test sets, respectively. We observed that the (structural) graph‐based signatures were the most important set of features for predicting destabilizing mutations, which points out that these signatures properly describe the changes in the environment where the mutations occur. More specifically, GPCR‐tm was able to accurately rank mutations based on their effect on protein stability, guiding their rational stabilization. GPCR‐tm is available through a user‐friendly web server at https://biosig.lab.uq.edu.au/gpcr_tm/.