Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

This application requests funding for an automated peptide synthesizer with an integrated purification system as a departmental facility that will also be available to other researchers on campus, especially in the Faculty of Agriculture, Life & Environmental Sciences (ALES). The instrument will be placed in the Biological Services Facility of the Chemistry Department. It will be accessible to all researchers in our department (30 faculty, 213 graduate students: the main users are expected to be the research groups of 7 faculty in the Chemical Biology section). It will also be accessible to the group of Dr. Michael Gaenzle and his collaborators in ALES. Peptides, as short polymers of amino acids, are present in all life forms and have a wide variety of important functions ranging from hormonal signaling to antimicrobial activity. They can be made by well-established methods using automated sequential addition of reagents, including the individual constituent amino acids, to an appropriately activated insoluble solid support. At the end of the multi-day cycle, the finished peptide is cleaved from the solid support and automatically purified. Although manual chemical synthesis of individual peptides is possible and is currently done in our laboratory, the requested instrumentation allows simultaneous independent synthesis of up to 48 different peptides. This greatly increases throughput and efficiency (the instrument can run unattended 24 hours per day), not to mention providing relief from tedious and repetitive procedures for graduate student and postdoctoral researchers.