Many compounds that contain peptide bonds are naturally-made products that have biological activity within the human body. Because of this, many compounds that contain peptides are used in the pharmaceutical and medical field, as they can have beneficial effects on health. Because harvesting these types of chemicals from their living sources can be costly and time inefficient, which leads to a high-priced medication, there has been a push to create non-natural amino acid mimics. The current method of synthesizing peptide bonds involves adding a coupling agent to a solution containing the reactants (an amine and a carboxylic acid) dissolved in an organic solvent. While this method typically results in a high yield of the desired product, this method is not green because it produces a large amount of organic waste that is very costly to recycle. A new method of creating peptide bonds in water facilitated by detergents will be investigated as an environmentally-friendly alternative procedure. By synthesizing a variety of amides, this new method will be compared to the current method in terms of yield, cost, toxicity, and quantity of waste produced, and the results will be presented.

Viability of peptide coupling reactions in water facilitated by detergents

2019 Spring National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.