Lanterna Rally

Author: Ruixuan Ryan Yu

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

Total protein synthesis allows the preparation of proteins with chemically diverse modifications. The numerous advantages of total synthesis are sometimes offset by some major limitations. Protein synthesis is a non-trivial task involving many chemical steps, and these steps increase with the size of the protein. Therefore, larger proteins are difficult to synthesize with high yield. We have developed a strategy which we term hybrid-phase native chemical ligation (NCL) to overcome some of the limitations of size and yield. Hybrid-phase NCL combines ligating peptides on a solid support (solid-phase NCL) and in solution (solution-phase NCL) to maximize synthetic yield. We have successfully used this method to synthesize triple-acetylated histone H4-K5ac,K12ac,K91ac and, for the first time, acetylated centromeric histone CENP-A-K124ac (CpA-K124ac). In order to improve the yield of CENP-A total synthesis, we have incorporated a convergent ligation element in our hybrid-phase strategy. This new approach reduced the number of purification steps, leading to a synthetic yield that was almost triple that of the original approach. Finally, we introduce the convergent solid-phase hybrid NCL approach that allows the preparation of a long peptide segment bearing a masked thioester on a solid support. Through a newly developed resin-anchoring strategy, cleavage of the product from solid-phase generated a ligation-compatible segment that could be used directly with no purification. This method has the potential to synthesize large proteins in good yield, effectively overcoming the size and yield limits of protein total synthesis.