Deconstructing green fluorescent protein

Green fluorescent protein (GFP) has been reassembled from two pieces, a large fragment 214 amino acids in length that is produced recombinantly (GFP 1-10) and a short synthetic peptide corresponding to the 11th stave of the beta-barrel that is 16 amino acids long (synthetic GFP 11), following a system developed by Waldo and co-workers (Cabantous, S.; et al. Nat. Biotechnol. 2005, 23,102-7) as an in vivo probe for protein association and folding. We demonstrate that the reassembled protein has identical absorption and excited-state proton transfer dynamics as a whole protein of the identical sequence. We show that the reassembled protein can be taken apart and the peptide replaced with a different synthetic peptide designed to perturb the chromophore absorption. Thus, this semisynthetic reassembly process offers a general route for studying the assembly of the R-barrel as well as the introduction of unnatural amino acids.