Solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) enables routine synthesis of virtually any type of peptide sequence and is the preferred method for peptide synthesis in academia and the pharmaceutical industry alike. Still,...

Significant efforts have been made in recent years to identify more environmentally benign and less hazardous alternatives to N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF) in solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS). Several greener solvents have been...

This review highlights the efforts made to date to promote greener peptide synthesis, from an industrial perspective.

The solid-phase synthesis of pharmacologically interesting heterocycles is presented. The formation of a series of (5,5)-, (5,6)-, (6,5)-, and (6,6)-fused bicyclic ring systems was systematically studied by implementation of a common strategy involving N-acyliminium intermediates. These are highly reactive and transformed further in intramolecular cascade reactions with strong as well as weak C, N, S, and O-nucleophiles. The methodology was successfully applied to the conversion of peptidomimetics into constrained small molecule core structures, such as the hexahydropyrrolo[2,1- b][1,3]oxazines, generally with full control of diastereoselectivity (>20:1) and in purities above 90%.

Many bacterial species are capable of assessing their local population densities through a cell-cell signaling mechanism termed quorum sensing (QS). This intercellular communication process is mediated by small molecule or peptide ligands and their cognate protein receptors. Numerous pathogens use QS to initiate virulence once they achieve a threshold cell number on a host. Consequently, approaches to intercept QS have attracted considerable attention as potential anti-infective therapies. Our interest in the development of small molecule tools to modulate QS pathways motivated us to evaluate triazole-containing analogs of natural N-acyl L-homoserine lactone (AHL) signals as non-native QS agonists and antagonists in Gram-negative bacteria. We synthesized 72 triazole derivatives of five broad structure types in high yields and purities using efficient Cu(I)-catalyzed azide-alkyne couplings. These compounds were evaluated for their ability to activate or inhibit two QS receptors from two prevalent pathogens – LasR from Pseudomonas aeruginosa and AbaR from Acinetobacter baumannii – using bacterial reporter strains. Several triazole derivatives were identified that were capable of strongly modulating the activity of LasR and AbaR. These compounds represent a new and synthetically accessible class of AHL analogs, and could find utility as chemical tools to study QS and its role in bacterial virulence.