Robust Chemical Synthesis of Membrane Proteins through a General Method of Removable Backbone Modification.

Chemical protein synthesis can provide access to proteins with post-translational modifications or site-specific labelings. Although this technology is finding increasing applications in the studies of water-soluble globular proteins, chemical synthesis of membrane proteins remains elusive. In this report, a general and robust removable backbone modification (RBM) method is developed for the chemical synthesis of membrane proteins. This method uses an activated O-to-N acyl transfer auxiliary to install in the Fmoc solid-phase peptide synthesis process a RBM group with switchable reactivity toward trifluoroacetic acid. The method can be applied to versatile membrane proteins because the RBM group can be placed at any primary amino acid. With RBM, the membrane proteins and their segments behave almost as if they were water-soluble peptides and can be easily handled in the process of ligation, purification, and mass characterizations. After the full-length protein is assembled, the RBM group can be readily r...