The use of unnatural amino acids to study and engineer protein function

The expansion of the genetic code for the incorporation of unnatural amino acids (UAAs) in proteins of bacteria, yeasts, mammalian cells or whole animals provides molecular and structural biologists with an amazing kit of novel tools. UAAs can be used to investigate the structure and dynamics of proteins, to study their interactions or to control their activity in living cells. Incorporation of UAAs with bioorthogonal reactivity facilitates the site-specific installation of labels for spectroscopy and microscopy. Light-activatable crosslinker UAAs can be used to trap interacting molecules in living cells with a precision almost at the structural level. Post-translational modifications such as lysine acetylation and serine phosphorylation can be directly encoded to analyse their impact on protein function, and caging groups can be installed on critical residues to create light-activatable proteins. In this review we highlight recent applications of this technology to investigate protein function.