Coming: A Protein Synthesis Revolution

Large peptides can be made in hours, not days


Kira Welter has written an article for Chemistry World, the publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry, explaining how polypeptide chains can be created that are larger and much faster to create than through the use of current methods.

“….Although the expansion of the genetic code has made it possible to incorporate some unnatural units into proteins, the flexibility offered by chemical approaches is peerless. To make synthetic proteins, chemists rely on solid phase peptide synthesis, which involves building a peptide chain, one amino acid at a time, on a polymer resin. But this approach can only produce peptides up to 50 amino acids long, so several fragments must be created and stitched together to obtain proteins. This makes the approach time-consuming and laborious.

“Researchers working with Bradley Pentelute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, have overcome this limitation using a flow reactor. Their new automated chemical protocol has allowed them to prepare peptides up to 164 amino acids long in hours – something that would take several days of synthesising and then stitching together smaller peptides using conventional techniques. ‘Before, we couldn’t make long sequences, we could only make peptides,’ Pentelute says. ‘Now, we can make a protein on the machine, and that’s the result of optimising the chemistry.’

More at:  https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/protein-synthesis-revolution-on-way-as-large-peptides-made-in-hours-not-days/4011891.article