Photo-cleavable purification/protection handle assisted synthesis of giant modified proteins with tandem repeats

Proteins with tandem repeats have essential physical or biological roles in cells and have been widely investigated as biomaterials or vaccines. Chemically derived proteins with tandem repeats would be beneficial for research, owing to their accurate structures, possibly with precise modifications, produced by chemical synthesis. Traditional protein synthesis often leads to severe handling loss due to multiple ligations and HPLC purifications. To improve the protein synthesis efficiency, we developed a purification/protection handle consisting of a His₆ tag and a photo-labile linker. This handle has great potential to facilitate purification with immobilized metal affinity chromatography techniques and also provides orthogonal protection for N-terminal Cys. The synthesis of the model proteins Muc1 and antifreeze glycoprotein mimics shows that the handle decreases the requirement for HPLC and enables both convergent and sequential assembly of peptide segments.