Nico J. Meeuwenoord

Teichoic acids (TAs) are key components of the Gram‐positive bacterial cell wall that are composed of alditol phosphate repeating units, decorated with alanine or carbohydrate appendages. Because of their microhetereogeneity, pure well‐defined TAs for biological or immunological evaluation cannot be obtained from natural sources. We present here a streamlined automated solid‐phase synthesis approach for the rapid generation of well‐defined glycosylated, glycerol‐based TA oligomers. Building on the use of a “universal” linker system and fluorous tag purification strategy, a library of glycerolphosphate pentadecamers, decorated with various carbohydrate appendages, is generated. These are used to create a structurally diverse TA‐microarray, which is used to reveal, for the first time, the binding preferences of anti‐LTA (lipoteichoic acids) antibodies at the molecular level.

A set of four phosphoramidite building blocks containing a strained dibenzocyclooctyne moiety is reported, including one example equipped with a cleavable disulfide linker. Application of these amidites in solid-phase oligonucleotide synthesis yields either 5′- or 3′-cyclooctyne-modified nucleic acids. The strained cyclooctyne-bearing oligonucleotides are used in rapid and clean conjugation reactions with azide-containing (bio)molecules.

The transmembrane segments of soluble N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor (SNARE) proteins or viral envelope proteins drive membrane fusion, which suggests that simple synthetic biology constructs for fusion exist and can be evaluated. We describe the high-yield synthesis of a set of de novo designed fusogenic peptides for use in functional investigations, which are highly enriched in ¹³C and ¹⁵N using three equivalents of labelled amino acids and optimized reaction conditions minimizing aggregation. The biomimetic peptides have a high purity >90% and show reproducible and fusogenic activity that correlates well with the intended functional design characteristics, from strongly fusogenic to almost non-fusogenic. Copyright © 2006 European Peptide Society and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A convergent synthetic route to the construction of a PNA-N-to-C-peptide conjugate (PKKKRKVGC-ttgcatt) by regioselective condensation of a thioester peptide and a cysteine-PNA adduct under denaturating conditions is described.