Many ideas of biotechnology, as well as biochemical and pharmaceutical research will benefit from the introduction of a new method of peptide synthesis which uses mild reagents. At present progress is limited by the rigorous purification and characterization processes that are necessary for peptides synthesized by either of the two currently accepted methods. The heart of this proposal is the novel chemistry of Prof. George Barany of the University of Minnesota. It is believed that introduction of a range of dithiasuccinoyl amino acids, and ancilliary reagents, will provide a high yielding, racemization free method of synthesizing highly pure peptides; with consequent dramatic improvements in productivity and the complexity of peptides accessible by chemical synthesis. In phase 1 of the research, methods suitable for large scale commercial preparation of Dts= derivatives will be developed, and studies performed on the automatic synthesis of a challenging sequence to confirm the suitability of the procedure. In phase 2, a novel automatic petide synthesizer designed specifically to exploit the merits of the method will be developed, as will be methods to synthesize the derivatives in multikilogram amounts.
