Dissection of the class A scavenger receptor by peptide engineering

The construction of portions of a protein provides information about its functional mechanisms. Peptide engineering is a recently developed technique to construct a small tertiary structure or a portion of a protein, and allows expansion to applications for bio- and physicochemistries. In this article, we focus on the class A scavenger receptor, which plays a key role in atherogenesis, and may be involved in other pathogenic processes. The receptor is mainly composed of simple tertiary structures, such as collagen and alpha-helical coiled coil structures, which have different functions. We constructed both the collagen-like and alpha-helical coiled coil domains by peptide engineering, and analysed the structure-function relationships of the receptor. Understanding the mechanisms of their functions at the amino acid level should help us to mimic the functional domains and to create de novo designed proteins with new functions.