You’ve just finished a peptide synthesis and now it’s time to cleave the peptide from the resin. You’ve selected a specific cleavage cocktail, performed the reaction and now what? The vast majority of peptide chemists will precipitate their peptide using an ether solution, lyophilize, and move on to purification. But is that the only option?

In today’s post I’ll highlight an alternative strategy that saves both processing time, potentially dangerous reagents, all without compromising the integrity of the recently synthesized peptide.

In a previous post, I did some work evaluating the efficiency of alloc removal with tetrakis palladium using microwave assistance and atmospheric conditions, which worked beautifully.  Given the known sensitivity of palladium catalysts (see Derek Lowe's post for a humorous dialogue), I sought to further explore the sensitivity of palladium towards the alloc removal in the context of a peptide.

In this post, I'll explore a variety of atmospheric, room temperature alloc deprotection conditions aimed at evaluating the catalytic lifetime of palladium tetrakis for effective alloc removal. 

As a chemist new to the peptide community, there are many choices that have to be made.  Which coupling reagents to use? Heat or no heat to promote chemistry? And most importantly, which resin?  I have talked previously about resin choices, from loading levels to swelling capacity and how they affect the synthesis outcome.  But I haven't addressed yet a fundamental feature of commercially available resins, and that's the functional handle to which the peptide chain is conjugated.

In today's post, I'll describe some, and I mean only some, of the most commonly used chemical functionalities for Fmoc-based solid phase peptide synthesis and some scenarios in which you would choose one resin type over another.

Chemical synthesis of peptides, and even proteins, offers the possibility to expand the functionality and stability imbued by nature.  However, chemical synthesis of very long peptides and small proteins remains today an exceedingly difficult task.  Several ligation strategies have been developed that help to alleviate this challenge.  These strategies though, require a purified, yet fully protected peptide fragment.

Orthogonal amino acid protecting groups effectively expand the chemical tool kit available to peptide chemists allowing for synthesis of much more complex molecules.  Often times, orthogonal protecting groups are used in Fmoc-based chemistry to facilitate post-synthesis modifications of peptides, like the addition of small molecule fluorophores and more commonly now, peptide cyclization efforts.