Enzyme Design and Catalytic Function for the Production of Novel Materials

伯克利分校和加州大学旧金山分校的这项合作项目旨在生产具有有用性质的新聚合肽。研究人员都是优秀的科学家，尽管他们都得到了其他拨款的大力支持。特别是，Craik博士还有另一项NSF拨款，这与他在这项提案中所做的努力是重复的。P.I.开发了在有机溶剂中将氨基酸酯与游离氨基酸反应生成二肽的酶促方法。该方法已扩展到四肽，但该策略似乎不太可能产生有用的聚合物，尽管它对于短肽来说可能是实用的。应该注意的是，羧基肽酶不能用于这种合成，因为它没有酰基酶中间体。这个提议中有一些有趣的想法，但通过这些方法合成多肽的实用性似乎微乎其微。

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.