SUBSTRATE FOR ENZYMATIC PEPTIDE SYNTHESIS
67
facilitate the formation of the coupling product. Furthermore, the resulting peptides
lacking the site-specific group are no longer involved in its reverse process, thus
hydrolysis of the resulting peptides are retarded.
It is necessary to compare our result with the finding of Schellenberger et al. (4)
who noticed the versatility of inverse substrate as a tool for peptide synthesis and
attempted the use of p-guanidinophenyl ester. Schellenberger’s work, however, did
not include any information on the reaction rate. Therefore the direct comparison
of the practical applicabilities of both methods is inadequate. It was noticed that
the experiments were carried out using much higher concentrations of enzyme and
acyl acceptor than those of ours, 10-fold and 3-fold, respectively. The paper mainly
concerned determination of ‘‘partition constant,’’ the rate ratio between hydrolysis
and coupling. Calculation of the partition constants was carried out for our case.
The values were determined to be 8.6–5 m
M
for the typical examples in Table 3
(for cases which afford 70–80% yield), and these values were 10-times smaller than
those of Schellenberger et al. (4); i.e., ours are preferable for peptide synthesis.
This is the reason why in our case a low concentration of acyl acceptor (one-third
of that used by Schellenberger et al.) is applied to the coupling. Thus it may be
concluded that p-amidinophenyl esters are much more suitable as a tool for peptide
synthesis. One possible reason for this would be the difference in the acylation
efficiencies of their respective substrates. An adequate explanation for this has to
await detailed kinetic analysis and the study is now in progress.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported in part by grants from The Akiyama Foundation and The Fugaku Trust
for Medicinal Research.
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