Rapid Establishment of G-Protein-Coupled Receptor–Expressing Cell Lines by Site-Specific Integration

The establishment of mammalian cell lines reliably expressing G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) can be a tedious and often time-consuming process. A strategy has been developed to allow the rapid production of such cell lines. The first step of this approach was the generation of a specialized master cell line, characterized by optimized stable expression of a membrane-bound reporter protein. In the second step, this reporter gene was exchanged for that of the GPCR of interest by a DNA recombinase “cut-and-paste” engineering step. It has been demonstrated that the resulting GPCR cell lines inherit the advantages of the master cell line, expressing the GPCR in a homogeneous and stable manner. The case studies presented demonstrate the functionality of the established GPCR cell lines, and most important, because of the highly efficient integration event, these recombinant GPCR-expressing cell lines were generated within a timeframe of 2 to 4 weeks. The advantages of this cut-and-paste approach versus other strategies such as Flp-In or Jump-In are compared.