Chemical synthesis of yeast mitochondrial ATP synthase membranous subunit 8.

: Chemical synthesis of highly hydrophobic peptides and proteins remains a challenging problem. Strong interchain associations within the peptide-resin matrix have to be overcome. A synthetic strategy for solid phase peptide synthesis is proposed, mainly based on prolonged coupling time using aprotic polar solvent mixtures. A tailored chromatographic purification was required to obtain a sample sufficiently pure for structural analysis. In this work, the total chemical synthesis of the membrane-embedded yeast mitochondrial ATP synthase subunit 8 is described. The quality of the synthetic protein was checked by electrospray mass spectrometry, its tendency to adopt alpha-helical secondary structure is evidenced by circular dichroism spectroscopy.