Native Chemical Ligation of Thioamide-Containing Peptides: Development and Application to the Synthesis of Labeled α-Synuclein for Misfolding Studies

Thioamide modifications of the peptide backbone are used to perturb secondary structure, to inhibit proteolysis, as photoswitches,and as spectroscopic labels. Thus far, their incorporation has been confined to single peptides synthesized on solid phase. We have generated thioamides in C-terminal thioesters or N-terminal Cys fragments and examined their compatibility with native chemical ligation conditions. Most sequence variants can be coupled in good yields with either TCEP or DTT as the reductant, though some byproducts are observed with prolonged TCEP incubations. Furthermore, we find that thioamides are compatible with thiazolidine protection of an N-terminal Cys, so that multiple ligations can be used to construct larger proteins. Since the acid-lability of the thioamide prohibits on-resin thioester synthesis using Boc chemistry, we devised a method for the synthesis of thioamide peptides with a masked C-terminal thioester that is revealed in situ. Finally, we have shown that thioamidous peptides can be coupled to expressed protein fragments to generate large proteins with backbone thioamide labels by synthesizing labeled versions of the amyloid protein alpha-synuclein for protein folding studies. In a proof-of-principle experiment, we demonstrated that quenching of fluorescence by thioamides can be used to track conformational changes during aggregation of labeled alpha-synuclein.