Protein Prosthesis: A Semisynthetic Enzyme with a β-Peptide Reverse Turn

Abstract
This paper reports the first incorporation of a beta-peptide turn unit into an enzyme (RNase A) using the method of expressed protein ligation (EPL). Upon replacing Asn113-Pro114 with R-nipecotic acid-S-nipecotic acid (R-Nip-S-Nip), not only does the RNAse maintain its full catalytic activity, it shows a slightly elevated thermal stability. Although the ligation yields are low, the results are important because they show that...