“…Having a series of phosphonic acid analogues of phenylglycine [13] variably substituted in aromatic rings in hand, we decided to determine their activity towards the commonly studied aminopeptidase N (alanine aminopeptidase, pAPN) from porcine kidney [11,14,15], which is a good model enzyme for human alanine aminopeptidase (hAPN), because the two enzymes contain one zinc ion in the active site and exhibit a similar pattern of activity towards series of the same synthetic substrates [16]. The human enzyme is overexpressed in various types of cancer and on the surface of the vasculature undergoing angiogenesis and is thus considered as a promising target for anticancer therapy [4,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. The pattern of inhibitory activity found for pAPN was compared with the experimentally determined activity of the same set of compounds towards the newly isolated and only preliminarily characterized aminopeptidase from barley seeds [18,19].…”