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Updated: Apr 3, 2026
Patterning Bioactive Proteins or Peptides on Hydrogel Using Photochemistry for Biological Applications
Published on: September 15, 2017
Rational design of a photo-responsive UVR8-derived protein and a self-assembling peptide-protein conjugate for
Xiaoli Zhang1, Chunming Dong, Weiyun Huang
1State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology, College of Life Sciences and Key Laboratory of Bioactive Materials, Ministry of Education, Nankai University, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin), Tianjin 300071, P. R. China. wangtingliang@tsinghua.edu.cn.
Abstract:
Responsive hydrogels hold great potential in controllable drug delivery, regenerative medicine, sensing, etc. We introduced in this study the first example of a photo-responsive protein for hydrogel formation. Based on the first example of the crystal structure of a photo-responsive protein, Arabidopsis thaliana protein UVR8, we designed and expressed its derived protein UVR8-1 with a hexa-peptide WRESAI. We also prepared supramolecular nanofibers with a TIP-1 protein at their surface. The simple mixing of these two components resulted in rapid hydrogel formation through the specific interactions between the protein TIP-1 and the peptide WRESAI. Since the protein could show a reversible dimer-monomer transformation, the resulting gels also showed a reversible gel-sol phase transition which was controlled by photo-irradiation. The photo-controllable gel-sol phase transition could be applied for protein delivery and cell separation.
