Protein engineering has enabled development of many useful therapeutic and consumer products. This is typically done using biological methods, mainly changing the underlying gene sequence, or sometimes utilising enzymes able to carry out a limited set of post-translational protein modifications. Meanwhile, the harsh conditions of chemical peptide synthesis typically mean that non-biological methods for protein engineering are mostly limited to smaller peptides.
In contrast, our new photoredox protein engineering technology uses light-activated chemistry to precisely graft new amino acid side chains onto existing proteins, without damaging them. This enables a very wide array of precise chemical modifications to be incorporated into proteins.
At the heart of this technology is generation of carbon-carbon bonds, which allows the introduction of almost any sidechain into a protein, so potential applications are vast, and in many cases, able to generate engineered proteins that cannot be created using any other technique.
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