Peptide Publications Archive
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Lasso Peptide Surgery
Chu Lab
Lasso peptides are mechanically interlocked natural products whose knotted topology has made them resistant to chemical editing. A new chemoenzymatic strategy cuts and re-seals the …
Pocket Engineering Polymyxin
Kries Lab
Polymyxin antibiotics save lives but cause kidney damage and face rising resistance. A single amino acid substitution in a biosynthetic enzyme now enables direct fermentative …
Unmasking Thioaldehydes
Myers Lab
Cysteine thioaldehydes are fleeting, reactive intermediates implicated in penicillin biosynthesis, RiPP natural products, coenzyme A assembly, and sulfatase activation, yet their aqueous chemistry has resisted …
Unlocking the Power of Biosynthetic Tailoring Enzymes
Barry Lab
Biosynthetic cytochrome P450 enzymes can selectively oxidize inert C–H bonds on complex cyclic peptides, but studying them has been nearly impossible without reliable access to …
Homocitrulline Reimagined
Rosenzweig Lab
Homocitrulline is known in human biology only as a marker of chemical damage, arising when isocyanic acid nonenzymically carbamoylates lysine during aging and inflammation. Now …
Ribosomal Nitrile
van der Donk Lab
Nitrile groups are prized warheads in peptide drug design, yet no ribosomal peptide natural product had ever been found to carry one. A genome-mining campaign …
Radical Ring Fusion
Dong Lab
Lanthipeptides have never been found to carry an azepinoindole scaffold, and radical SAM enzymes have never been caught stitching together two adjacent residues in a …
Untangling Interlocked Peptides
Link Lab
Mechanically interlocked peptides span lasso peptides, cysteine knots, and viral chainmail capsids, yet the fields studying them have run in parallel rather than together. A …
Siderophore Shape-Shifting
Hertweck Lab
Bacteria rarely repurpose a single metabolite to serve two opposing ecological needs, yet that is precisely what Pandoraea species do with their pandorachelin lipopeptides: an …
Mining Biarylitides
Crüsemann and Cryle Groups
Biarylitides are bacterial RiPPs built from the smallest known genes in all of life, just 18 base pairs, making them nearly invisible to conventional genome …
Decoding HDAC Inhibitor Assembly
Challis & Alkhalaf Labs
A family of depsipeptide HDAC inhibitors that includes the lymphoma drug romidepsin share a conserved pharmacophore fused to structurally diverse peptide caps, but the molecular …
Decoding Terukufazoline
Iwasaki Lab
A 22-residue macrocyclic cyanobactin collected from a remote Japanese island proved too spectrally complex to sequence by conventional NMR and tandem MS alone. Metagenomics cracked …
Unexpected Biaryl Rings
Xu Lab
Glycopeptide antibiotics owe their potency to a precise architecture of biaryl cross-links, but the full repertoire of those cross-links was thought to be known. Targeted …
Mussel-Inspired Batteries
Wooley Lab
Catechol-bearing polypeptides built entirely from natural feedstocks can double as redox-active electrode materials and mussel-inspired binders, but getting the catechol density right proved decisive. Researchers …
Breaching Candida
van der Donk Lab
A class II lanthipeptide from the cyanobacterium Nostoc punctiforme kills Candida species by disrupting cell membranes, marking the first antifungal activity reported for this lanthipeptide …
Lipid-Hijacking RiPPs
van der Donk Lab
Bacteria already possess a well-oiled machinery for anchoring lipoproteins to their membranes. A new study reveals that a family of ribosomally synthesized peptides has co-opted …
DarF Decoded
Phan Lab
An enzyme in the darobactin biosynthetic pathway had been classified as a protease for years. New biochemical evidence shows it is actually an α-ketoglutarate-dependent oxidase …
Mapping Hidden Enzymes
Wang Lab
Genome mining reliably maps biosynthetic gene clusters for ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides, RiPPs, yet routinely misses enzymes encoded elsewhere in the genome. A …
Leaderless Death Caps
Pringle, Keller, & Drott Labs
Researchers in the Pringle and Keller Groups at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in PNAS, combined chemistry-guided metabolite isolation with an updated bioinformatic pipeline …
Split Lasso Discovery
Seyedsayamdost & Moon Groups
Marine actinomycete produces anticancer lasso peptides from a split biosynthetic gene cluster separated by over 2 million base pairs.
Convergent Bradykinin Mimicry
Robinson Lab
Researchers in the Robinson Group at the University of Queensland, published in Science, demonstrated that bradykinin-like peptides found in hymenopteran venoms and anuran skin …
Jujube Unlocked
Kersten Lab
Researchers in the Kersten Group at the University of Michigan, published in J. Am. Chem. Soc., identified candidate biosynthetic genes in the genome of …
Ginkgo Degrader
Tam Lab
Researchers in the Tam Group at Nanyang Technological University identified a hyperdisulfide-constrained peptide from Ginkgo biloba nuts, termed β-ginkgotide β-gB1, as a first-in-class
Oxidative Backbone Cleavage
van der Donk Lab
Researchers in the van der Donk Group at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, used genome …