Amino-dPEG®₄-t-butyl ester

Amino-dPEG®4-t-butyl ester, product number 10221, is a crosslinking reagent consisting of a primary amino group and the tert-butyl ester of a propionic acid group built around a core of monodisperse polyethylene glycol (PEG). The terminal amine reacts with carboxylates to form amide bonds and with aldehydes and ketones to form semi-labile, reducible Schiff bases. Trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) effectively removes the tert-butyl ester protecting group, thus freeing the propionic acid for reaction with amines or formation of an active ester with N-hydroxysuccinimide (NHS) or 2,3,5,6-tetrafluorophenol (TFP).

Why should I use dPEG® products?
OurdPEG® products provide advantages over both hydrophobic crosslinkers and traditional PEGylation reagents.

PEG-based crosslinkers are superior to hydrophobic crosslinkers because they are amphiphilic, meaning that they dissolve in both water and organic solvents. PEGylation improves water solubility and increases the hydrodynamic volume of conjugates. Conjugates with increased hydrodynamic volumes have longer in vivo circulation times. Also, PEGylated molecules have many fewer or no non-specific interactions due to hydrophobicity.

However, traditional PEGylation reagents are disperse polymers. These products consist of complex mixtures of different PEG chains and molecular weight. This complexity makes conventional PEGylation reagents quite challenging to analyze and characterize.

Contradistinctively, our dPEG® products are monodisperse, single molecular weight PEGylation reagents synthesized from high-purity starting materials. Each dPEG® product contains a single PEG chain of discrete length and molecular weight. This single-molecule property makes dPEG® products much easier to analyze and characterize.

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