earticle

영어

This study introduces the characteristics and some applications of repetitive polypeptides, especially to the biomaterial, tissue engineering scaffolds, drug delivery system, and DNA separation systems. Since some fibrous proteins, which consist of repeating peptide monomers, have been reported that their physical properties are changed dramatically by means of
temperature alteration or pH shifting. For that reason, fibrous protein-mimetic polypeptides, which are produced by the recombinant technology, can be applied to the diverse biological fields. Repetitive polypeptides can also be used in the bioseparation area such as DNA sequencing, because they make DNA separation possible in free-solution electrophoresis by conjugating DNA fragments to them. Moreover, artificial synthesis of repetitive polypeptides helps to demonstrate the correlations between mechanical properties and structures of natural protein polymer, which have been proven that repetitive domains are affected by the sequence of the repeating domains and the number of repeating subunits. Repetitive polypeptides can be biologically synthesized using some special cloning methods, which are represented here. Recursive directional ligation (RDL) and controlled cloning method (CCM) have been proposed as excellent cloning methods in that we can control the number of repetition in the multimerization of polypeptides and the components of repetitive polypeptides by either method.

한국어

본 연구는 특정 아미노산들로 구성된 단위체가 반복되는 형태를 가지는 반복단위 단백질을 유전공학적으로 합성하는 방법들과 응용사례들을 소개하고 있다. 유전공학적합성법은 단위체의 반복횟수를 정확하게 제어하면서 인식부위의 제한을 없애서 원하는 단백질만을 발현할 수 있도록 발전해왔으며, 최근 소개된 RDL과 CCM 방법에 의하여 가능해졌다. 반복단위 단백질의 응용사례로는 대표적으로 ELP, SLP, Prolamin 등의 단백질을 합성하여 생체재료나 약물전달시스템을 개발하는데 응용하거나, ELFSE의 drag-tag 개발에 응용되는 연구들이 진행되고 있다. 화학적으로 합성된 고분자에 비해 유전공학적으로 합성된 반복단위 고분자의 경우, 고유의 물리적 성질과 함께 환경에 미치는 유해함이 상대적으로 적다는 점 때문에 미래의 신소재로 기대되고 있다.