SYNTHESIS AND STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL-EVALUATION OF A PROTEIN MODIFIED WITH A BETA-TURN MIMIC

Protein engineering has traditionally relied upon the possibility of c hanging the primary structure by either site-directed mutagenesis or p eptide synthesis. Recently the scope of these methods has been extende d to non-natural amino acids by both biosynthetic and synthetic approa ches. A further step in which a complete structural motif is replaced by an equivalent synthetic mimic has been validated in small peptides. We extend these results to the field of protein engineering by incorp orating a beta-turn mimic into a small protein, scyllatoxin, which con tains all major secondary structure elements. The synthetic scyllatoxi n was structurally and functionally characterized and Pound to be equi valent to the native protein.