Protein Modifications and Bioconjugation

Dear Colleagues,

You are cordially invited to contribute to a Special Issue of “Protein Modifications and Bioconjugation”. Since structures determine functions, modifications of proteins modulate their functions, and, thus, play diverse and crucial roles in chemistry, biology, medicine and engineering. For example, various post-translational modifications (PTM’s) are essential key players in gene regulation and disease development, and many of the enzymes involved (e.g., methyltransferases, kinases and deacetylases) have been actively pursued as drug targets. Pertinent to PTMs, a battery of selective derivatization methods has been developed to label or tag modified amino acids, thereby permitting facile detection and affinity enrichment. From an engineering point of view, bioconjugation introduces new functions to proteins. For therapeutic applications, PEGylation has widely employed to enhance circulation half-lives, to reduce immunogenicity and to shield from proteolysis. Recently, antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) have introduced new opportunities for battling diseases that were not possible with either antibodies or drugs alone. With the advent of many site-specific bioconjugation techniques, hybrid modality engineering of peptides and proteins represents a promising fertile frontier in the next-generation of materials and medicine.

All aspects of the topics are welcome, including both method developments and novel discoveries. Topics include but limited to bioconjugation of peptides and proteins, protein synthesis, post-translational modifications (PTMs), unnatural amino acids, peptide and protein pharmaceuticals (e.g., antibody-drug conjugates and hybrid modality engineering), functional probes and proteomics (e.g., activity-based protein profiling), specific chemo-enzymatic tagging and affinity labeling, and protein analysis (e.g., mass spectrometry) that involve chemical derivatization. Both original report and review are accepted.

Prof. Dr. Zhaohui Sunny Zhou
Prof. Dr. Litai Jin
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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