Intracellular Reactions Promoted by Bis(histidine) Miniproteins Stapled Using Palladium(II) Complexes

Abstract

The generation of catalytically active metalloproteins inside living mammalian cells is a major research challenge at the interface between catalysis and cell biology. Herein we demonstrate that basic domains of bZIP transcription factors, mutated to include two histidine residues at i and i+4 positions, react with palladium(II) sources to generate catalytically active, stapled pallado‐miniproteins. The resulting constrained peptides are efficiently internalized into living mammalian cells, where they perform palladium‐promoted depropargylation reactions without cellular fixation. Control experiments confirm the requirement of the peptide scaffolding and the palladium staple for attaining the intracellular reactivity