ペプチドの交互共重合法の開発と交互配列の機能探索

抄録

Polypeptides are a promising class of polymers that can be used to develop new biodegradable and biocompatible materials from the viewpoint of sustainable development goals as the overall aim. Natural structural proteins such as fibroin, collagen, elastin, and resilin have a specific repeating sequence, which exhibit excellent mechanical properties desirable for use in biomedical applications. However, the sequence-ordered polymerization technique for polypeptide has not been sufficiently developed. This review describes one-pot synthesis of alternating peptides via polycondensation of an imine with an ambident molecule comprising isocyanide and carboxylic acid. The elemental reaction of the polycondensation is Ugi four component condensation reaction for catalyst-free dipeptide synthesis. The molecular weights (M_ws) of the obtained polymers were estimated by DOSY-based technique. As the applications of our invention, we newly created the viscoelastic alternating peptides with shear-induced adhesion behaviors, the alternating peptide-based surfactants, and the thermo-responsive hydrogel comprising alternating peptide skeleton as the cross-linking points. We also investigated the impact of polypeptide sequence on thermo-responsiveness. Because of the skeletal diversity and the good scalability of preparation, alternating peptides may be regarded as useful framework for the development of peptide-based smart materials in the future.