First “structural rewiring” of a yeast amino acid transporter published in JBC

A study by Ghaddar, Krammer et al. carried out in collaboration with Martine Prévost (ULB, Structure and Function of Biological Membranes) and entitled “Converting the yeast arginine Can1 permease into a lysine permease” has been published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry. This work presents our first structural analysis of a yeast amino acid transporter (see figure). Modelling of the substrate binding site and insertion by mutagenesis of amino-acid substitutions allowed us to switch the substrate-specificity of the permease. This opens the interesting perspective to solve the structural code of amino acid recognition by yeast amino acid permeases and to establish links with regulation.