Mild and Selective Mono-Iodination of Unprotected Peptides as Initial Step for the Synthesis of Bioimaging Probes

Chemoselective functionalization of peptides and proteins to selectively introduce residues for detection, capture, or specific derivatization is of high interest to the synthetic community. Here we report a new method for the mild and effective mono-iodination of tyrosine residues in fully unprotected peptides. This method is highly chemoselective and compatible with a wide variety of functional groups. The introduced iodine can subsequently serve as a handle for further functionalization such as introduction of fluorescent dyes and thus be used for chemoselective labeling of isolated peptides.