A research group led by Professor Ryosuke Miyake of Ochanomizu University and Associate Professor Takahiro Muraoka of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology has succeeded in creating a huge space comparable to protein from soft small molecules using artificially designed peptides.
Biological substances such as proteins realize highly environmentally responsive functions that are difficult for artificial substances through the flexible skeleton of their constituent peptides.Above all, the flexible spatial structure created by peptides plays an indispensable role in living organisms such as accurate molecular recognition and efficient substance transport and storage.Therefore, artificially forming a space with a flexible skeleton is considered to be one of the important techniques, but a space made of soft material is fragile, and a large structure is assembled using a flexible skeleton. Was very difficult.
This time, the research group conceived that even if the skeleton is flexible, if it is stabilized by combining it in a mesh pattern, it will be possible to form a huge space, and the shape of the soft skeleton will be controlled by metal coordination bonds and hydrogen bonds. As a result, we succeeded in creating spatial structures of various sizes from peptide molecules with extremely flexible structures.With this structure, it was possible to form several types of spaces with different sizes by 10 times or more by recognizing slight differences in conditions from the exact same molecule.
From this result, it can be expected that the space can be freely designed according to the purpose.This can be expected to lead to the creation of artificial proteins with complex functions that show high efficiency and energy saving, which was difficult until now.
