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Photocleavage of the polypeptide backbone by 2-nitrophenylalanine
Francis B Peters1, Ansgar Brock, Jiangyun Wang
1Department of Chemistry and the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.
Abstract:
Photocleavage of the polypeptide backbone is potentially a powerful and general method to activate or deactivate functional peptides and proteins with high spatial and temporal resolution. Here we show that 2-nitrophenylalanine is able to photochemically cleave the polypeptide backbone by an unusual cinnoline-forming reaction. This unnatural amino acid was genetically encoded in E. coli, and protein containing 2-nitrophenylalanine was expressed and site-specifically photocleaved.
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