Diaminodiacid Bridges to Improve Folding and Tune the Bioactivity of Disulfide-Rich Peptides

Abstract

Disulfide-rich peptides containing three or more disulfide bonds are promising therapeutic and diagnostic agents, but their preparation is often limited by the tedious and low-yielding folding process. We found that a single cystine-to-diaminodiacid replacement could significantly increase the folding efficiency of disulfide-rich peptides and thus improve their production yields. The practicality of this strategy was demonstrated by the synthesis and folding of derivatives of the μ-conotoxin SIIIA, the preclinical hormone hepcidin, and the trypsin inhibitor EETI-II. NMR and X-ray crystallography studies confirmed that these derivatives of disulfide-rich peptide retained the correct three-dimensional conformations. Moreover, the cystine-to-diaminodiacid replacement enabled structural tuning, thereby leading to an EETI-II derivative with higher bioactivity than the native peptide.

Keywords: disulfide-rich peptide; peptide synthesis; peptide therapeutics; protein engineering; protein folding.