Glowing amino acids

Chemists at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Göt­tin­gen have now suc­ceed­ed in pro­duc­ing the struc­ture of the chromones, which is par­tic­u­lar­ly active in bio­log­i­cal sys­tems and drugs, in just one step — start­ing from inex­pen­sive start­ing mate­ri­als. The results of the study have been pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature Communications.

When active ingre­di­ents are pro­duced tra­di­tion­al­ly, many syn­thet­ic steps are often nec­es­sary. In addi­tion, rel­e­vant amounts of waste and byprod­ucts are gen­er­at­ed in the process. For the cur­rent work, the researchers used a rhodi­um cat­a­lyst in com­bi­na­tion with elec­tric cur­rent to pro­duce impor­tant active struc­tures in a resource-effi­cient way and thus elec­tro­chem­i­cal­ly mod­i­fy pep­tides. The team devel­oped a new con­cept to label mod­i­fied tyro­sine amino acids in pep­tides. Selec­tive­ly mod­i­fy­ing pep­tides is dif­fi­cult, but impor­tant for bio­chem­istry and med­i­cine, among oth­ers, to under­stand mol­e­c­u­lar cell processes.

The nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring amino acid tyro­sine could be elec­tro­chem­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied in such a way that the mol­e­cules flu­o­resced under irra­di­a­tion. “It’s fas­ci­nat­ing that we can make amino acids glow through an elec­tro­chem­i­cal reac­tion,” says Prof. Lutz Ack­er­mann of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Göt­tin­gen, who led the study. The researchers are con­vinced that their find­ings will enable fur­ther more effi­cient com­pound man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es that bring improved prop­er­ties for bio­chem­i­cal research and med­ical applications.