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Protein engineering

Finding the best ligase

Modification of folded proteins at will, within any sequence context, remains an elusive goal. A proteome-wide screening approach has now identified a set of protein ligases that enables conjugation of peptides to almost any protein N terminus, overcoming longstanding limitations in protein engineering.

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Figure 1: N-terminal modification of proteins with peptide esters mediated by subtiligase mutants with different P1′–P2′ specificity.

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Correspondence to Christian F W Becker.

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Becker, C. Finding the best ligase. Nat Chem Biol 14, 2–3 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.2533

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