Inclusion volume solid-phase synthesis

Centrifugation Based Automated Synthesis Technologies

Centrifugation is a powerful method for solid-liquid separation. It can be applied in numerous ways to simplify solid phase synthetic procedures. At the same time, centrifugation is the only totally parallel technique which can be scaled up for processing volume or number of simultaneously run reactions, without the limitation of overpressure or vacuum-driven filtration-based systems. We have developed synthesizers based on the power of centrifugation — peptide and small organic molecule synthesizers utilizing cotton as the synthetic substrate and inclusion volume chemistry, synthesizers for automation of “tea bag” synthesis, and synthesizers based on “tilted plate centrifugation”. The last technique was employed in an oligonucleotide production facility with the capacity of more than 10 million compounds per year.

Selective ligands for the mu, delta, and kappa opioid receptors identified from a single mixture based tetrapeptide positional scanning combinatorial library

A combinatorial library of 6,250,000 tetrapeptides in the mixture based positional scanning format was screened in binding assays for the three opioid receptors, mu, delta, and kappa. Three different binding profiles were found. Individual peptides were synthesized representing all possible combinations of the active amino acids identified from the screening data. New, highly active peptides selective for each of the three receptors were chosen. This study demonstrates the power of mixture-based combinatorial libraries to identify distinctly different ligands for closely related receptors.