Our laboratory focuses on the bioorganic chemistry of proteins.
Proteins are large organic molecules of amazing compositional and conformational diversity.
Efforts to understand the molecular basis for protein function have largely used biological techniques to modify the sequence of amino acids that defines a protein's structure and function. Unfortunately, these modifications are limited to the naturally occurring 20 amino acids. We have developed a chemical approach for producing the large polypeptide chains that make up protein molecules. Synthetic access to these polypeptides enables us to change the structure of a protein in ways impossible in Nature. We use solid-phase peptide synthesis to generate peptides up to approximately 50 amino acids long and then use chemoselective reactions to assemble the peptides into proteins up to about 200 amino acids long.