Synthesis and Studies of Water-Soluble, Alpha-Helical Polypeptide with Charged Side Chains

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In this project funded by the Macromolecular, Supramolecular and Nanochemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Jianjun Cheng of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will synthesize and study water-soluble, alpha-helical polypeptides with charged side chains. Polypeptides are important materials with broad applications and characteristic secondary structures. Water-soluble polypeptides bearing charged side chains typically adopt random coil conformations due to side-chain charge repulsion. In this study, we aim to develop water-soluble, alpha-helical polypeptides by elongating charge-containing amino-acid chains to position the charges distally from the polypeptide backbone and then to study their biophysical properties. Preliminary studies will be performed to test these polymers for use in cell penetration and bacterial inhibition. The broader impacts involve training undergraduate and graduate students, participating in summer high school outreach and undergraduate broadening participation activities at the University of Illinois, and disseminating research results through publications in journals and presentations at conferences. Peptides are chains of chemically linked amino acids and are the components of proteins. This work will expand the repertoire of chemistry that can be used to create new large molecules that mimic natural biomaterials and will lead to a better understanding of how peptides can be engineered to form stable secondary structures, such as an alpha-helix, in water. The results of these studies could have many important long term impacts on applications in which protein-based materials are important, including long term applications in medicine, pharmaceutical processing, and nanotechnology.