BRIL is a protein that is frequently inserted into membrane proteins to bulk them up for structure determination. Modifications introduced by Guo et al. (1) have been shown to make it more useful for studying GPCRs. It also has many antibodies and nanobodies that have been released that bind with high affinity (2,3).
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Ref (1)
1.
Guo Q, He B, Zhong Y, Jiao H, Ren Y, Wang Q, et al. A method for structure determination of GPCRs in various states. Nature Chemical Biology. 2023;20(1):74–82. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41589-023-01389-0
2.
Mukherjee S, Erramilli SK, Ammirati M, Alvarez FJD, Fennell KF, Purdy MD, et al. Synthetic antibodies against BRIL as universal fiducial marks for single−particle cryoEM structure determination of membrane proteins. Nature Communications. 2020;11(1). Available from: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15363-0
3.
Miyagi H, Asada H, Suzuki M, Takahashi Y, Yasunaga M, Suno C, et al. The discovery of a new antibody for BRIL-fused GPCR structure determination. Scientific Reports. 2020;10(1). Available from: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-68355-x