Motomu Kanai, a renowned Professor at the University of Tokyo, will be giving a lecture at the CEISAM laboratory (Marie Curie room) on Friday, April 14th at 3pm. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like to meet with him on April 14th.
The lecture will focus on the chemoselective bioconjugation of proteins and is likely to be of interest to a wide audience.
Motomu Kanai
Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo
Our long-term research goal is to develop synthetic catalysts or reagents that surrogate or even surpass enzymes and to use synthetic catalysis in our body as a new paradigm of medicine (catalysis medicine) [1]. This research direction will in turn contribute to the green synthesis of functional molecules, including drugs, in test tubes or factories. To do so requires powerful catalysts or reagents, which can functionalize stable, multifunctional molecules ranging from small molecules to biomacromolecules, under mild conditions and protecting group-free settings with synthetically-valuable selectivity (e.g. chemo-, target-, site-, and residue-selectivity).
Protein bioconjugation is a key methodology in this research direction. We are especially interested in proteinmodifications through modulating the redox states. I will discuss tryptophan-selective bioconjugation using keto-ABNO [2] and tyrosine-selective bioconjugation using iminoxy radicals [3].
[1] Tetrahedron 2023, 131, 155. [2] JACS 2016, 138, 10798; Bioconjugate Chem. 2023, ASAP. [3] JACS 2021, 143,
19844.