Chemical Protein Synthesis Definition

Chemical protein synthesis is named in contrast to the biological protein synthesis. The synthesis is by coupling the carboxyl group or C-terminus of one amino acid to the amino group or N-terminus of another. It is also called peptide synthesis, because the length of synthesized amino acid sequence is limited by current synthesis technology. The most length of synthesized is about 50 AAs.

Peptide Synthesis
Peptide Synthesis

Protein synthesis is the nature biological process with two big steps, transcription and translation. The transcription is from DNA to mRNA and the translation is from mRNA to protein. For more details, please read more.

Chemical protein synthesis

The chemical total synthesis of proteins, even of small proteins, is by no means trivial and a tedious enterprise. Solid phase peptide synthesis is the most powerful method for the synthesis of small- to medium-sized peptides (5-50 amino acids). The iterative coupling steps accumulate by-products, the separation of which is difficult with longer sequences. Convergent methods avoid the “cumulative disaster” of linear synthesis. Access to large peptides can be provided by employing medium-sized peptide segments that are easily available by solid phase synthesis. The most successful approach involves the segment coupling of unprotected peptide segments.
The bottleneck of native chemical ligation is the tedious peptide thioester synthesis. Moreover cysteine is rare in protein sequences and in many cases an artificial cysteine residue has to be introduced for the sake of ligation.

Protein production

For more detail, please see to Wikipedia.