Selective chemical protein modification.

Journal article

Chemical modification of proteins is an important tool for probing natural systems, creating therapeutic conjugates and generating novel protein constructs. Site-selective reactions require exquisite control over both chemo- and regioselectivity, under ambient, aqueous conditions. There are now various methods for achieving selective modification of both natural and unnatural amino acids--each with merits and limitations--providing a 'toolkit' that until 20 years ago was largely limited to reactions at nucleophilic cysteine and lysine residues. If applied in a biologically benign manner, this chemistry could form the basis of true Synthetic Biology.

Authors: Spicer, C; Davis, B

• Journal: Nature communications
• Volume: 5
• Pages: 4740
• Publication date: 2014-01-01
• DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5740
• EISSN: 2041-1723
• Language: English