To begin, label three sets of sterile 1.7-milliliter tubes and one set of sterile 15-milliliter conical bottom tubes. Prepare a swing bucket centrifuge with 15-milliliter tube inserts and pre-cool to four degrees Celsius. Take the six-well cell culture plate with transfected 293FT cells.
Aspirate the media from the wells. Add 250 microliters of trypsin-EDTA and incubate at 37 degrees until cells begin to detach. Then add one milliliter of 10%FBS supplemented assay media to each well and pipette vigorously to create a single-cell suspension.
Transfer one milliliter of cell suspension to pre-labeled 15-milliliter tubes. Add one milliliter of 10%FBS supplemented assay media to each of these tubes and invert five times to mix. Then immediately transfer 20 microliters of cell suspension to tube set one.
Now centrifuge the 15 milliliter tubes for five minutes at 250 g in a pre-cooled centrifuge. Mix 20 microliters of trypan blue cell stain with cells in set one and count using a cell counter or hemocytometer. After removing the 15-milliliter tubes from the centrifuge, aspirate media from cell pellets and resuspend pellets in serum-free assay media to create a single-cell suspension.
To reflate cells in 384-well and six-well plates, invert the 15-milliliter tubes several times for a homogenous cell suspension and transfer 500 microliters to 1.7 milliliter tubes in set two and set three. Add 0.5 microliters of DMSO to set two and 0.5 microliters of Halo 618 ligand to tube set three and mix well. Transfer the DMSO and ligand-positive cell suspensions to separate wells of reagent reservoirs.
Use a multi-channel pipette to transfer 40 microliters of each suspension to the 384-well culture plate. Transfer the remaining cells to fresh six-well culture plates for subsequent western blot analysis and incubate both 384-well and six-well plates overnight at 37 degrees Celsius and 5%carbon dioxide. Take serum-free assay media prewarmed at 37 degrees Celsius.
Dilute the thawed nanoluciferase substrate 1:100 in serum-free assay media and transfer it to a reagent reservoir. Using a multi-channel pipette, transfer 10 microliters of substrate mixture to each well of the 384-well culture plate. Gently rotate the plate for one minute.
Insert the 384-well plate into a multi-mode plate reader and record the 460 and 618 nanometers emissions from all wells with cells. Calculate the raw BRET ratios for vehicle-positive and ligand-positive in milliBRET units using the given equation. Calculate the corrected BRET ratio by subtracting the vehicle-positive BRET ratio from that of the ligand-positive.
The nano-CRAFS259A mutant reduces the BRET signal by approximately 45%and the nano-CRAFS621A mutant by around 25%The double mutant nearly eliminates the BRET signal.
