International Cooperation

Major Advancement in Protein Design

On Mar. 12, 2011, the German magazine Angewandte Chemie published online a paper entitled ““Dramatic Increase of Oxidase Activity through the Genetic Incorporation of Tyrosine-Histidine Crosslink in a Myoglobin Model of Heme-Copper Oxidase”, which is the fruit of a collaboration of Wang Jiangyun’s group at Institute of Biophysics and Yi Lu’s group at the Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigny. By directly incorporating the unnatural amino acid imiTyr into myoglobins, the research has successfully designed a functional HCO model imiTyrCuBMb that catalyzes selective and efficient oxygen reduction to water. This work provides the first direct evidence of the post-translationally modified Tyr-His cross-link function in HCO. It is an important progress in the field of protein design, while relevant important application in bioenergetics is now expected.