Trifluoroethanethiol: An Additive for Efficient One-Pot Peptide Ligation−​Desulfurization Chemistry

Native chemical ligation followed by desulfur­ization is a powerful strategy for the assembly of proteins. Here we describe the development of a high-yielding, one-pot ligation−​desulfur­ization protocol that uses trifluoro­ethane­thiol (TFET) as a novel thiol additive. The synthetic utility of this TFET-enabled methodology is demonstrated by the efficient multi-step one-pot syntheses of two tick-derived proteins, chimadanin and madanin-1, without the need for any intermediary purification.