The proposed technology is related to chemical modification of 'recombinant proteins' that are defined as a new combination of genes that forms DNA. Typical customers of the proposed technology will include biology or medicine researchers working on determination of protein structure, functions, and/or attempting to develop a novel technology based on chemically modified proteins. The anticipated customer of the proposed technology will be interested in a standard procedure for chemical modification of proteins that provides the desired product without laborious purification steps, guarantees no or minimal changes in the structure and functions of the protein, and can be assigned to any person possessing standard laboratory skills or to s robotic synthesizer.
The proposed technology is related to chemical modification of recombinant proteins, a process that is commonly used in biotechnology. It uses a hexahistidine tag, a short sequence present in the majority of recombinant proteins and commonly used for their purification by affinity chromatography, as a site for the covalent modification. Current methods for chemical modification produce mixtures of products that require substantial efforts of highly experienced personnel, optimization of reaction conditions, identification of reaction products, and purification of starting materials and products. The critical advantage of the proposed technology of covalent modification is its versatility as it can be applied to essentially any recombinant protein containing the hexahistidine tag. A large number of these proteins are commercially available and many thousands more can be expressed using the existent DNA vectors. Another major advantage is the possibility of conducting chemical modification of recombinant proteins in the presence of other proteins thus skipping the complicated purification stage.
