Honours Projects 2010

Dr Andrew Hughes

The cyclic tetrapeptide project

About 150 cyclic tetrapeptides are described in the Chemical Abstracts database. If all 20 of the common amino acids are used then there are 420 = 160 000 possible compounds. Many of the ones known do not use common amino acids so the total number is even higher. These compounds represent a large volume of structure space with many interesting compounds that may have useful therapeutic or biological properties, capacity to act as catalysts or contain information about peptide conformation or folding principles (advanced NMR and/or molecular modelling can be done.)