Miroslava Strmiskova, Kelvin Tsao and Jeffrey W Keillor
Org. Biomol. Chem., 2018
doi: 10.1039/C8OB01417E
Rationally designed libraries of a short helical peptide sequence containing two cysteine residues were screened kinetically for their reactivity towards complementary dimaleimide fluorogens. This screening revealed variant sequences whose reactivity has been increased by an order of magnitude relative to the original sequence. The most reactive engineered sequences feature mutant residues bearing positive charges, suggesting the pKa values of the adjacent thiol groups have been significantly lowered, through electrostatic stabilization of the thiolate ionization state. pH-rate profiles measured for several mutant sequences support this mechanism of rate enhancement. The practical utility of the enhanced reactivity of the final engineered dicysteine tag (‘dC10*’) was then demonstrated in the fluorogenic intracellular labelling of a specific protein in living cells.
A blog highlighting recent publications in the area of covalent modification of proteins, particularly relating to covalent-modifier drugs. @CovalentMod on Twitter, @covalentmod@mstdn.science on Mastodon, and @covalentmod.bsky.social on BlueSky
Discovery and Optimization of a Covalent AKR1C3 Inhibitor
R. Justin Grams, Wesley J. Wolfe, Robert J. Seal, James Veccia, and Ku-Lung Hsu Journal of Medicinal Chemistry 2025 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedch...
-
DOI Ansgar Oberheide, Maxime van den Oetelaar, Jakob Scheele, Jan Borggräfe, Semmy Engelen, Michael Sattler, Christian Ottmann, ...
-
Özge Ünsal, Z. Selin Bacaksiz, Vladislav Khamraev, Vittorio Montanari, Martin Beinborn, and Krishna Kumar ACS Chemical Biology 2024 DOI: ...
-
Klett, T., Schwer, M., Ernst, L. N., Engelhardt, M. U., Jaag, S. J., Masberg, B., … Boeckler, F. M. Drug Design, Development and Therapy, 20...