Faculty

Philip Dawson 
Associate Professor
Department of Cell Biology
TSRI - 1997

Joint Appointments 
CHEMISTRY

Education 
A.B. Washington University, 1992; Ph.D., The Scripps Research Institute, 1996; Postdoctoral Fellow, California Institute of Technology, 1996-1997.

Awards & Activities 
Alfred P. Sloan Fellow 2001-2003; Editorial Board, Letters in Peptide Science 2000-2003; Faculty of 1000, Chemical Biology Section 2001 to present.

Research Focus 
Development & Utilization of Methods to Incorporate Unnatural Chemical Groups into Proteins

We have developed a chemical approach for the production of the large polypeptide chains that comprise protein molecules, enabling us to change the structure of a protein in ways impossible by natural means. We use solid phase peptide synthesis to generate peptides up to ~50 amino acids in length and then assemble them using chemoselective reactions to make proteins up to ~150 amino acids in length. This—chemical ligation—approach greatly facilitates the synthesis of proteins of moderate size and has opened the world of proteins to the synthetic tools of organic chemistry. Chemical ligation can be extended to biologically expressed proteins enabling the semisynthesis of proteins of unlimited size that contain fluorophores or cross-linking agents at defined positions. Our goal is to introduce non-coded amino acids and other chemical groups into proteins to better understand the molecular basis of protein function.

Selected References 
Hackeng, T.M., Griffin, J.M. and Dawson, P.E. Protein synthesis by native chemical ligation: Expanded scope by straightforward methodology. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 96:10068-10073, 1999.


Beligere, G.S. and Dawson, P.E. Design, synthesis, and characterization of 4-ester C12, a model for backbone hydrogen bonding in protein a-Helices. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 122:12079-12082, 2000


Yan, L. and Dawson, P.E. Synthesis of peptides and proteins without cysteine residues by native chemical ligation combined with desulfurization. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 123:526-533, 2001.

Offer, J., Boddy, C.N., Dawson, P.E. Extending synthetic access to proteins with a removable acyl-transfer auxiliary. J. Am. Chem. Soc., in press.