Recent Advances in Protein Caging Tools for Protein Photoactivation

In biosciences and biotechnologies, it is recently critical to promote research regarding the regulation of the dynamic functions of proteins of interest. Light-induced control of protein activity is a strong tool for a wide variety of applications because light can be spatiotemporally irradiated in high resolutions. Therefore, synthetic, semi-synthetic, and genetic engineering techniques for photoactivation of proteins have been actively developed. In this review, the conventional approaches will be outlined. As a solution for overcoming barriers in conventional ones, our recent approaches in which proteins were chemically modified with biotinylated caging reagents are introduced to photo-activate a variety of proteins without genetic engineering and elaborate optimization. This review mainly focuses on protein caging and describes the concepts underlying the development of reported approaches that can contribute to the emergence of both novel protein photo-regulating methods and their killer applications.