Enzyme Design and Catalytic Function for the Production of Novel Materials

加州大学伯克利分校和加州大学旧金山分校的合作项目旨在生产具有实用特性的新型聚合肽。调查人员都是优秀的科学家，尽管他们都得到了其他资助。特别是，Craik博士获得了另一项NSF资助，这重复了他在这项提案中的努力。P.I.已经开发了酶法，使氨基酸酯在有机溶剂中与游离氨基酸反应生成二肽。这种方法已经扩展到四肽，但这种策略似乎不太可能产生有用的聚合物，尽管它可能对短肽实用。需要注意的是，羧基肽酶不能用于这种合成，因为它没有酰基酶中间体。在这个提议中有一些有趣的想法，但是用这些方法合成多肽的实用性似乎很小。

This collaborative project between workers at Berkeley and UCSF is designed to produce new polymeric peptides with useful properties. The investigators are all excellent scientists, although all well supported by other grants. In particular Dr. Craik has another NSF grant which duplicates his effort in this proposal. The P.I. has developed enzymatic methods for reacting amino acid esters in organic solvents with free amino acids to generate dipeptides. The approach has been extended to a tetra peptide, but the strategy seems unlikely to produce useful polymers, although it might be practical for short peptides. It should be noted that carboxypeptidase cannot be employed in such syntheses because it does not have and acyl enzyme intermediate. There are some interesting ideas in this proposal, but the practicality of synthesizing polypeptides by these approaches seems minimal.