The symposium entitled:
Challenges and prospects in chemoselective ligations: from protein synthesis to site-specific conjugation
have been held in Orléans (France), from Monday 27th to Wednesday 29th January 2020.
This three-day international conference was jointly organized by LE STUDIUM Loire Valley Institute for Advanced Studies and the Centre for Molecular Biophysics – CNRS Orléans. This event was held under the auspices of the French Peptide and Protein Group (GFPP) and followed three previous editions (Paris 2001, Lille 2008 and 2016) of short international meetings dedicated to chemical ligation. The official language of this meeting is English.
Recent years have seen an exponentially growing interest in chemical reactions enabling the selective modification of proteins and peptides. These advances are intimately linked to the development of methodologies for protein engineering with an atomic precision, for the generation of well-defined antibody-drug conjugates or on-demand probes to decipher biological processes. Such chemoselective reactions are also widely utilized for the total synthesis and semi-synthesis of proteins through chemical ligation of unprotected peptide fragments, an approach highly complementary to recombinant production. The chemical reactions implemented for both purposes share the same requirements: compatibility with dilute aqueous solution at physiological pH, and tolerance to the myriad functional groups commonly found in biomolecules. These remarkable features inspired the advent of bioorthogonal reactions, which can be carried out in living systems.
Sixteen invited speakers have accepted our invitation and covered the different aspects of these multidisciplinary fields, from methodology development to biological applications. In addition, contributions selected from submitted abstracts have been presented as oral communication and poster.
