Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Sequence-Specific Peptide Synthesis by an Artificial Small-Molecule Machine

Science

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6116/189.full?rss=1

Bartosz Lewandowski1,Guillaume De Bo1,John W. Ward1,Marcus Papmeyer1,Sonja Kuschel1,María J. Aldegunde2,Philipp M. E. Gramlich2,Dominik Heckmann2,Stephen M. Goldup2,Daniel M. D’Souza2,Antony E. Fernandes2,David A. Leigh1,2,*

The ribosome builds proteins by joining together amino acids in an order determined by messenger RNA. Here, we report on the design, synthesis, and operation of an artificial small-molecule machine that travels along a molecular strand, picking up amino acids that block its path, to synthesize a peptide in a sequence-specific manner. The chemical structure is based on a rotaxane, a molecular ring threaded onto a molecular axle. The ring carries a thiolate group that iteratively removes amino acids in order from the strand and transfers them to a peptide-elongation site through native chemical ligation. The synthesis is demonstrated with ~1018 molecular machines acting in parallel; this process generates milligram quantities of a peptide with a single sequence confirmed by tandem mass spectrometry. 

3 comments:

  1. Thanks Zhou for sharing such a interesting post with us. I really like your post.

    Biopeptek

    ReplyDelete
  2. Your blog content are realy good and we supply Custom peptide synthesis services online.

    ReplyDelete