MICHAEL W. PENNINGTON
President and C.E.O., Peptides International Inc.

Peptides have become valuable tools for researchers around the world. As new pharmaceutical targets are investigated, researchers have a need to have special peptide tools to aid in their research. The need for longer and more complex peptides has risen over the past several decades. This short report details some recent milestones in this sector.

Making peptides: balancing dreams and technical feasibility
The dream of many peptide chemists is the ability to synthesize longer and more complex molecules paralleling those which occur in nature. Synthetic techniques have advanced over the past 5 decades allowing for molecules to reach upwards of 100 residues from a linear solid-phase synthesis making mini-proteins accessible. However, one of the most recent achievements which has been advanced in the past 10-20 years is the technique of native chemical ligation pioneered by Dawson and Kent (1). Making use of C-terminal peptide thioesters reacting with another peptide containing a Cys at the N-terminus allows for a chemical ligation reaction which spontaneously rearranges to a native peptide bond at a pH of 7.2. This technique has ...