Coiled-Coil Peptide Beacon: A Tunable Conformational Switch for Protein Detection

The understanding of protein folding and assembly is of central importance for the design of proteins and enzymes with novel or improved functions. Minimalistic model systems, such as coiled-coils, provide an excellent platform to improve this understanding and to construct novel molecular devices. Along those lines, we designed a conformational switch that is composed of two coiled-coil forming peptides and a central binding epitope. In the absence of a binding partner, this switch adopts a hairpin-like conformation that opens upon receptor binding. Variation of the coiled-coil length modulates the strength of the intramolecular constraint. The two conformational states of this switch have been linked with characteristic fluorescent properties, which enables the detection of the receptor in real-time.