Synthesis of peptides of arginine chloromethyl ketone. Selective inactivation of human plasma kallikrein.

Synthetic procedures have been developed for the preparation of peptides of arginine chloromethyl ketone and applied in the preparation of affinity labels which correspond to the -Pro-Phe-Arg- C terminus of bradykinin, a physiological cleavage site of kallikrein in kininogen. Two such reagents, Ala-Phe-ArgCH2C1 and Pro-Phe-ArgCH2C1, proved to be highly effective as well as selective affinity labels for human plasma kallikrein. For example, Pro-Phe-ArgCH2C1 inactivates plasma kallikrein 50% in 24 min at a concentration of 2 x 10(-8)M, while other trypsin-like proteases are less susceptible in inactivation than kallikrein, differing by a factor of 48 for plasmin and factors of 10(2)-10(5) for factor Xa, thrombin, and urokinase. The affinity of human plasma kallikrein for Ala-Phe-ArgCH2C1 (Ki = 0.078 micron) is about 60 times that for Ala-Phe-LysCH2C1(Ki = 4.9 micron), whereas human plasmin exhibits about the same affinity for the former affinity label (Ki = 1.3 micron) as for the latter (Ki = 0.83 micron). The rate constants for the irreversible step of the affinity labeling reaction, k2, are similar for affinity labels tested with the individual proteases: 0.35 min-1 for plasma kallikrein and 0.18 min-1 for plasmin.