Temporary Solubilizing Tags Method for the Chemical Synthesis of Hydrophobic Proteins

Hydrophobic proteins, as one of the cellular protein classifications, play an essential function in maintaining the normal life cycle of living cells. Researches on the structure and function of hydrophobic proteins promote the exploration of the causes of major diseases, and development of new therapeutic agents for disease treatment. However, the poor water solubility of hydrophobic proteins creates problems for their preparation, separation, characterization and functional studies. The temporary solubilizing tags are considered a practical strategy to effectively solve the poor water solubility problem of hydrophobic proteins. This strategy can significantly improve the water solubility of hydrophobic peptides/proteins, making them like water-soluble peptides/proteins easy to be purified, characterized. More importantly, the temporary solubilizing tags can be removed after protein synthesis, so thus the structure and function of the hydrophobic proteins are not affected. At present, temporary solubilizing tags have been successfully used to prepare many important hydrophobic proteins such as membrane proteins, lipoproteins and chaperones. In this review, we summarize the recent researches and applications of temporary solubilizing tags.