Turkish Journal of Chemistry
Abstract
Abelson-1 (ABL-1) is a nonreceptor tyrosine kinase that plays essential roles in various cellular processes, including proliferation, survival, differentiation and its kinase activity is tightly regulated. The dysregulated ABL-1 kinase activity is linked to disease pathogenesis like Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML), where the BCR::ABL-1 fusion oncoprotein drives oncogenic signaling. Due to its central role in CML pathogenesis, understanding the structure of ABL-1 is crucial for the effective management of the disease and drug development studies. This study focuses on optimizing the expression, purification and crystallization of the recombinant human ABL-1 kinase domain for its structural analysis via X-ray crystallography and structure-based drug screening applications. The human ABL-1 kinase domain, fused with a SUMO-tag, was expressed in Escherichia coli Rosetta2 BL21 using the pET28(a)+ expression vector. The ABL-1 aggregates seen under native culture conditions were successfully solubilized by the mild ionic detergent sarkosyl. After obtaining soluble expression of the protein, Ni-NTA affinity chromatography was performed and high yield of purified ABL-1 was obtained. The 6X-His-SUMO-tag of purified ABL1 was cleaved by ULP1 protease. The recombinant ABL-1 was subsequently used in crystallization trials to enlighten structural features of ABL-1 that could guide the development of novel therapeutics and drug screening platforms targeting ABL-1 in CML.
Author ORCID Identifier
AYÇA İRGİT: 0009-0002-4406-8325
HALİLİBRAHİM ÇİFTÇİ: 0000-0002-9796-7669
HASAN DEMİRCİ: 0000-0002-9135-5397
DOI
10.55730/1300-0527.3776
Keywords
ABL-1 kinase, protein purification, x-ray crystallography, chronic myeloid leukemia
First Page
12
Last Page
20
Publisher
The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK)
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
İRGİT, A, ÇİFTÇİ, H, & DEMİRCİ, H (2026). Expression, purification, and crystallization of recombinant human ABL-1 kinase for X-ray crystallography. Turkish Journal of Chemistry 50 (1): 12-20. https://doi.org/10.55730/1300-0527.3776