Lead Chief Investigators:
Gottfried Otting, The Australian National University
Richard Payne, The University of Sydney
Summary
Site-specific labels allow site-specific interrogation of structure and function. Chemical synthesis of isotope-labelled peptides is prohibitively expensive. In vivo production of peptides is possible in fusion with larger proteins, but experience shows that the peptides tend to be lost following proteolytic cleavage, e.g. with TEV protease. Preliminary experiments by the Otting group have shown that fusions with calmodulin successfully produce a 20-residue peptide that could not be produced in fusions with trigger factor, ubiquitin, SUMO domain or maltose binding protein. This project will explore the general validity of the approach. In a next step, the isotope-labelled peptide is to be used for fusion with unlabelled polypeptide chains to produce a segmentally isotope-labelled protein.
Relevance to the Centre
This project aligns with the Centre’s aim to decode the function of peptides.