Molecular Cloning of Protein-Based Polymers

Protein-based biopolymers have become a promising class of materials for both biomedical and pharmaceutical applications, as they have well-defined molecular weights, monomer compositions, as well as tunable chemical, biological, and mechanical properties. Using standard molecular biology tools, it is possible to design and construct genes encoding artificial proteins or protein-based polymers containing multiple repeats of amino acid sequences. This article reviews some of the traditional methods used for constructing DNA duplexes encoding these repeat-containing genes, including monomer generation, concatemerization, iterative oligomerization, and seamless cloning. A facile and versatile method, called modules of degenerate codons (MDC), which uses PCR and codon degeneracy to overcome some of the disadvantages of traditional methods, is introduced. Re-engineering of the random coil spacer domain of a bioactive protein, WPT2-3R, is used to demonstrate the utility of the MDC method. MDC re-constructed coding sequences facilitate further manipulations, such as insertion, deletion, and swapping of various sequence modules. A summary of some promising emerging techniques for synthesizing repetitive sequence-containing artificial proteins is also provided.