More and more we are seeing groups that would historically undertake only traditional organic chemistry or possibly biochemistry/biology, incorporate peptides into their research programs.  While this is good for expanding the application scope and diversity in the peptide space, bringing synthesis in house can be a daunting undertaking. 

In today's post, I'll talk about what it takes to get a peptide synthesis operation up and running, with a few considerations along the way.

Disulfide rich peptides have gained significant attention recently due to their incredible biological stability and tolerance to epitope grafting.  This class of peptides is often folded in solution, assuming the desired disulfide bond pattern correlates with the most thermodynamically stable structure.  Sometimes though, especially for chemically synthesized cysteine rich peptides, this is not the case.  The result is a complex mixture of peptides with varying disulfide bonding patterns and identical mass.

Resins for solid phase peptide synthesis can vary significantly in both functionalization and composition, leading to mixed results at the end of a synthesis.  Previously, I demonstrated how the resin loading level affects the success or failure of your peptide synthesis.

In today’s post, I’ll highlight how both the hydrophilicity and swelling capacity of your resin can influence your peptide synthesis.

Mass-directed purification, whether with a preparative HPLC or a bench-top flash system, is quickly gaining interest in the peptide purification space.  The simple fact is that using a specific mass, rather that UV absorbance, to trigger fraction collection allows for greater confidence in the identity of the collected fraction.  Importantly though, this technique can also reduce your time required for purification, by significantly reducing or even eliminating the need for secondary mass analysis of each collected fraction. 

When it comes to synthesizing a peptide, the first thing that comes to mind is the number of stoichiometric equivalents to use.  Sometimes that number is as few as 1.5, sometimes it’s as high as 20!

But have you ever thought about the liquid volume that contains those molecules and how that might affect the success of your coupling reaction?  In this post I will discuss the impact of amino acid concentration in the overall success of solid phase peptide synthesis.

It used to be easy with only polystyrene based resin types, but nowadays there is a broad choice of types to choose from, including everything from the C-terminal functionality (Rink vs Wang) to the polymer from which the resin itself is synthesized.

All resins have one thing in common, and that’s the reactive site loading level. In this post, I will share my experiences with how this important factor impacts the success of peptide synthesis.