Development Of An Automated Peptide Synthesizer

This proposal is directed towards the design, creation, and optimization of a peptide synthesis instrument capable of synthesizing over 100 peptides at a time by using the broadly accepted FMOC or t-BOC chemistries on traditional resin supports. Parallel segmented synthesis will operate at cycle times of 30 minutes for simultaneous addition of 16 amino acids and up to 16 synthesis stacks, and both will be comprised of 1 to 8 synthesis wafers. Each wafer may contain a polypeptide of completely independent sequence. There is an anticipated decrease of 30% in reagent consumption. The machine will reduce synthesis costs to less than $5 per amino acid. This instrument will enable the production of peptide libraries at low cost for applications requiring hundreds or thousands of peptides. Phase I will allow the creation of one semi-automated peptide synthesizer and the software to drive it. Automation will first be applied to the solvent delivery system and then to the entire process. Availability of hundreds of peptides in this manner will significantly reduce the cost and time of research into biological activity screening, mutagenesis, structural studies, etc.