Design and synthesis of artificial zinc finger proteins

Abstract

Of the DNA-binding motifs, the (Cys)2(His)2-type zinc finger motif has great potential for manipulation. The zinc finger motif offers an attractive framework for the design of novel DNA-binding proteins. Specially, a structure-based design strategy is valuable for the creation of new artificial zinc finger proteins that have novel DNA-binding properties, namely, long-DNA recognition, DNA bending, and AT-rich sequence recognition. Herein, new strategies for the design of multi-zinc finger proteins for the recognition of a target DNA sequence, a DNA-bending zinc finger protein, a (His)4-type zinc finger protein, and an AT-recognizing zinc finger protein are described based on recent experimental results.