Special Organic Chemistry Seminar

Protein is undoubtedly one of the key players in many biological phenomena.  Therefore, for deep understanding and regulating diverse biological events, development of chemical methods to selectively label a target protein is essentially important in chemical biology research.  In this paper, I describe our recent results on the development of chemistry-based methods for specific labeling of a protein driven by coupling of selective protein recognition and reaction.  A tosylate derivative that tethers a ligand part for selective binding to a target protein and a probe part to be attached to the protein surface was designed and synthesized.  This chemical reagent was incubated with a protein in cell, cell lysate, as well as in a pure sample of test tubes, which allow us to conduct the protein selective and site selective labeling.  We recently expanded this type of ligand-directed chemistry to useful methods applicable to selective labeling on surface or inside of live cells where target proteins was endogenously expressed.  We believe that the new chemistry is expected to facilitate various aspects of fundamental research, in addition to diagnostic or pharmaceutical applications.