A facile fluorescence assay is presented to evaluate the efficiency of amino-acyl-tRNA-synthetase/tRNA pairs incorporating non-canonical amino-acids (ncAAs) into proteins expressed in mammalian cells. The application of ncAAs to study G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) is described, including photo-crosslinking mapping of binding sites and bioorthogonal GPCR labeling on live cells.
Serfling, R., Seidel, L., Böttke, T., Coin, I. Optimizing the Genetic Incorporation of Chemical Probes into GPCRs for Photo-crosslinking Mapping and Bioorthogonal Chemistry in Live Mammalian Cells. J. Vis. Exp. (134), e57069, doi:10.3791/57069 (2018).