Scientists create new technology to rapidly generate synthetic proteins

MIT chemists have developed a protocol to reduce the time it takes to generate synthetic proteins.

Usually, synthesizing proteins is extremely time-consuming, but the scientists' tabletop automated flow synthesis machine strings together hundreds of amino acids in hours, MIT News reported. Researchers believe this advancement could help speed the development of new drugs.

In the 1960s, biochemist Bruce Merrifield suggested an alternative method to synthesize proteins by adding amino acids in a step-wise fashion, MIT News reported. Using his technology, it takes about one hour to add one amino acid to a peptide chain and study researchers found they could chemically produce protein chains up to 164 amino acids long. The majority of proteins in the human body are 400 amino acids long. 

Using flow chemistry, Brad Pentelute's lab has discovered a more rapid way to form these reactions. Forming each peptide bond takes 2.5 minutes. 

Pentelute, senior study author, is an associate professor of chemistry at MIT. 

Novo Nordisk, a company that makes protein drugs, became interested in synthesizing longer peptides and proteins, MIT News reported. The ultimate hope is to have a machine a user could input a protein sequence into that would put together amino acids for a desired protein to be established.

The researchers were able to synthesize Sortase A, a protein with 164 amino acids, as well as proinsulin, lysozyme and other proteins, according to MIT News. They found the function of their synthetic proteins was comparable to their biologically expressed variants.