Homo‐ and Hetero‐Oligomerization in the Slc26a Protein Family

The motor-protein prestin is thought to be a homo-oligomer, but the oligomerization motifs are unknown. We used the acceptor-photobleach variant of fluorescence-lifetime based FRET analysis to demonstrate that homo-oligomerization is not only common to mammalian and non-mammalian prestins, but occurs in widely divergent members of the Slc26a family proteins. We therefore tested the hypothesis that oligomerization is conserved across the Slc26a family by measuring FRET between different Slc26a family molecules. Our results show that hetero-oligomerization is common between family members, which suggest that common oligomerization motifs exist.