A small family of human proteins are called selenoproteins, which contain the amino acid number 21, selenocysteine. There are only 25 selenium proteins in the human body, but almost all of them are not yet characterized, due to the difficulty of producing these proteins in the usual methods of expression in bacteria. The chemical synthesis of proteins has tremendous potential to cover for the lack of expression in bacteria. In a new article published in the renowned journal Chemical Science we show for the first time the chemical synthesis of two human selenium proteins, SELM and SELW. This method has given the proteins in quantities of milligrams, and a high purity which can be used in the future for the study of these proteins.

מידע נוסף (אנגלית)