Development of strategies for the site-specific in vivo incorporation of photoreactive amino acids: p-azidophenylalanine, p-acetylphenylalanine and benzofuranylalanine
C. Behrens et al., Development of strategies for the site-specific in vivo incorporation of photoreactive amino acids: p-azidophenylalanine, p-acetylphenylalanine and benzofuranylalanine, TETRAHEDRON, 56(48), 2000, pp. 9443-9449
A major limitation of conventional site-directed mutagenesis is that substi
tutions are restricted to the 20 naturally occurring amino acids. While thi
s problem can be circumvented in vitro to allow the site-specific incorpora
tion of non-canonical amino acids, no similar in vivo methodologies yet exi
st. The main requirement for such a system is an aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase
able to exclusively recognize a cion-canonical amino acid and a suppressor
tRNA. The engineering of such activities in aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases has
proven to be problematic due to their high substrate specificity. Here we r
eport progress towards the development of an antibody-based methodology to
screen large mutant aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase libraries for specific recogn
ition of the non-canonical photoreactive benzofuran amino acid [3-(5'-benzo
furanyl)-alanine]. We also report the chemical synthesis and enantiomeric r
esolution of this amino acid. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights res
erved.