Recent Activity
Human type-2 relaxin: A facile synthetic method was developed. (May, 2014)
Pregnancy hormone relaxin is a small protein with insulin-like structure. Recently, relaxin is attracting increasing interest as its receptors were found in various organs in human body, such as the peripheral nervous system. Relaxin is now provided by the gene recombination technology. But the price of recombinant relaxin is high because the yield is low due to technical problems in the folding of prorelaxin and the enzymatic cleavage of the extra peptide. Chemical synthesis of relaxin has also been explored, but the yield was still not practical. We have succeeded in the chemical synthesis of relaxin in a facile and efficient manner by mixing the two peptides chains using our originally developed technique. The achievement was presented in BioTech2014, May 14, 2014, Tokyo.
