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1 Aug 2013

8th Chemistry and Biology of Peptides 2013

This year Nottingham University hosted the 8th Chemistry and Biology of Peptides on the 18th July 2013. The free meeting was organised under the auspices of the Protein & Peptide Science Group (PPSG) of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the European Peptide Society (EPS). With a very friendly atmosphere, the meeting was an opportunity to network, talk to people from various horizons (academia, industry, biotechnology) and engage with the sponsors. The organisers were Peter White (Novabiochem, Merck Millipore), Weng Chan (University of Nottingham), John Offer (NIMR, Mill Hill) and me (Laurent Caron, Cambridge Research Biochemicals). With about 100 delegates for a one-day symposium, this is one of the most popular peptide gathering in the UK.

This year Stephen Kent (the pioneer of native chemical ligation) kindly travelled from Chicago to give an introduction on D-protein synthesis and racemic protein crystallization. This is certainly an interesting way of looking for novel lead compounds.

Christian Hackenberger (Leibniz Institute Molecular Pharmacology) is interested in developing new chemoselective methods for labelling proteins and presented several examples of alternative ligation strategies such as Staudinger-phosphite ligation. He published some very interesting reviews:

Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2009, 47, 8234-8239
Chemoselective Staudinger-Phoshpite Reaction of Azides for the Phosphorylation of Proteins and Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2008, 47, 10030-10074
Chemoselective Ligation and Modification Strategies of Peptides and Proteins

Richard Farndale (University of Cambridge) presented his Toolkit approach (libraries of overlapping collagen peptides for mapping binding sites of collagen binding receptors). For instance, collagen is the most abundant protein in the body!

For more information about the speakers and their area of interest:

Dr. Steve Cobb, University of Durham
Dr. Jody Mason, University of Essex
Paul Moody, University College London
Nicola O’Reilly, London Research Institute
Dr. Fabio Rui, University of Nottingham

In a nutshell, a very good session to talk about the chemistry and biology of peptides. Hoping to see even more peptide enthusiasts in 2014 for the 9th edition…

 

 

Laurent Caron, Peptide Production Manger