Chemical Synthesis, Purification, and Folding of C‐X‐C and C‐C Chemokines

Publisher Summary The synthetic chemokines have been employed for investigations of their functions, structure- activity relationships, and three-dimensional structure. These studies have demonstrated that chemical synthesis is a straightforward route to chemokines and novel analogs. This chapter describes the rationale and procedures that have developed based on experience with the synthesis of chemokines. The first and foremost requirement for the study of a particular chemokine is obtaining sufficient pure material for the experiments, Furthermore, the study of structure-activity relationships involves building conclusions from the results of multiple analogs. This requires the generation of large numbers of analogs, so the methods chosen must be capable of fulfilling this need. Natural sources are not useful because the amounts that can be derived are very low, and it is not possible to modify the sequence. Both the chemical and DNA approaches can provide native chemokines and analogs with specific changes. The two approaches are fundamentally different, with the synthesis method being less known, and therefore some comparisons are useful.