Oxidative cyclization reagents reveal tryptophan cation–π interactions

Methods for selective covalent modification of amino acids on proteins can enable a diverse array of applications, spanning probes and modulators of protein function to proteomics1–3. Owing to their high nucleophilicity, cysteine and lysine residues are the most common points of attachment for protein bioconjugation chemistry through acid–base reactivity3,4. Here we report a redox-based strategy for bioconjugation of tryptophan, the rarest amino acid, using oxaziridine reagents that mimic oxidative cyclization reactions in indole-based alkaloid biosynthetic pathways to achieve highly efficient and specific tryptophan labelling. We establish the broad use of this method, termed tryptophan chemical ligation by cyclization (Trp-CLiC), for selectively appending payloads to tryptophan residues on peptides and proteins with reaction rates that rival traditional click reactions and enabling global profiling of hyper-reactive tryptophan sites across whole proteomes. Notably, these reagents reveal a systematic map of tryptophan residues that participate in cation–π interactions, including functional sites that can regulate protein-mediated phase-separation processes.