Peptide synthesis General Subject

Peptide synthesis is an extremely important area of chemistry for the pharmaceutical industry, and like any specialized area of chemistry, has its own set of unique problems associated with it. Racemization and purification of final products are two of the most difficult problems in this area. The use of enzymes has been explored as a possible answer to these problems since 1938 [29]. However, proteases needed to catalyze peptide synthesis are subject to rapid autolysis under the conditions needed to affect peptide coupling, so this has generally not been a practical approach until cross-linked enzyme crystals of proteases became available. The synthetic utility of protease-CLCs was demonstrated by the thermolysin CLC (PeptiCLEC -TR)-catalyzed preparation of the aspartame precursor Z-... 

From a strictly chemical point of view, the synthesis of glycosides still presents a formidable challenge to synthetic chemists in spite of major advances in the area [1], Unlike peptidic bonds, the formation of the glycosidic linkage is subject to various factors that include, among others, electronic, stereoelectronic, conformational, substituent, and reactivity effects generally associated with incipient oxocarbenium ions derived from carbohydrates. 

A simple case of the general transpeptidation reaction was the trans-amidation resulting in the formation of hippuric anilide from aniline and hippuric amide in the presence of papain. Since this reaction proceeded much faster than the enzymatic synthesis of hippuric anilide from hippuric acid and aniline, it seems reasonable to infer that exchange, in the former reaction, took place between the aniline and ammonia. Waley and Watson subjected L-lysyl-L-tyrosyl-L-lysine and L-lysyl-L-tyrosyl-L-leucine to treatment with chymotrypsin and trypsin at pH 7.8. In the hydrolysis mixture of either of these substrates they were able to identify lysyllysine which could have arisen only by rearrangement of the amino acids in peptide bond. The peptide may have reacted with the lysine liberated by hydrolysis ... 

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