Pepsyn: 100-mer of asp-gly repeats

Michael Pereckas (msp@ace.biochem.mcw.edu)
Tue, 25 Aug 1998 16:43:53 -0500

I have a customer who needs peptides of roughly 100 amino acids length
made up of asp-gly or glu-gly or asp/glu-gly-gly repeats. Poly-asp
and poly-glu are commercially available and he has done some
experiments with them, but poly-asp-gly (etc) seems not to be
commercially available. Unless someone knows of a source, that brings
us to the question of how to synthesize such things.

The two approaches that come to mind are:

1) Make Asp(OtBu)-Gly-OH (for example) and polymerize that in
solution. While my customer does not need a pure, single molecular
weight product, I fear that controlling the polymerization
sufficiently even to get molecular weights generally in the 10,000
region would be a research project in itself.

2) Make Fmoc-Asp(OtBu)-Gly-Asp(OtBu)-Gly-.....-OH (perhaps a 10-mer)
and then use 10 cycles of more-or-less conventional solid-phase
peptide synthesis to get a 100-mer. Solubility is the first potential
problem that comes to mind, but other show-stoppers probably exist,
too.

Has anyone done anything like this? Can anyone recommend any relevant
literature? Does anyone know of anyone who does work like this and
might be willing to take on this project for my customer?

-- 
Michael Pereckas  //  msp@mcw.edu  //  Michael.Pereckas@mixcom.com
Protein and Nucleic Acid Shared Facility, Medical College of Wisconsin
Research Technologist and sysadmin/webmaster of www.biochem.mcw.edu