A design for peptidation in the crystal lattice#

Abstract

Crystal structures of amino acid composites, where the side chains are engaged in salt formation, show, without exception, the alignment of the carboxyl and amino terminals, precisely to that required for peptide bond formation. The demonstration of peptide bond formation in such crystal composites, without greatly disturbing the crystal order, would amount to the translation of the crystal information to peptide sequence information. Efforts to accomplish this by co-crystallisation with a precursor that could photolytically generate the condensing agent, are presented