Synthetic metalloproteins

With the success of chemical syntheses and purification of large polypeptides ( > 50 amino acid residues) attention now focuses on developing protocols to correctly fold these products to generate species with high levels of bioactivity. The art of 'breathing life' into these molecules requires denaturation/renaturation, reduction/oxidation of sulfhydryls and assembly of holoproteins from apo-forms. We outline herein some of the strategies employed to assemble metalloproteins with activities essentially identical to that of their native counterparts.