Control of the Yeast Mating Pathway by Reconstitution of Functional α-Factor Using Split Intein-Catalyzed Reactions

Synthetic control strategies using signaling peptides to regulate and coordinate cellular behaviors in multicellular organisms and synthetic consortia remain largely underdeveloped because of the complexities necessitated by heterologous peptide expression. Using recombinant proteins that exploit split intein-mediated reactions, we presented here a new strategy for reconstituting functional signaling peptides capable of eliciting desired cellular responses in S. cerevisiae. These designs can potentially be tailored to any signaling peptides to be reconstituted, as the split inteins are promiscuous and both the peptides and the reactions are amenable to changes by directed evolution and other protein engineering tools, thereby offering a general strategy to implement synthetic control strategies in a large variety of applications.