Stirring Peptide Synthesis to a New Level of Efficiency

Accelerating solid-phase synthesis is crucial for accessing a large number of peptides in a short time. Since standard peptide synthesis is usually done under poor diffusion conditions with slow or no mixing of the solid support, acceleration of the process is achieved by applying a large excess of reagents. In this work, overhead stirring and heating were combined to provide accelerated solid-phase peptide synthesis without using an excess of reagent. A new setup that allows both heating and fast stirring was designed specifically for research laboratory-scale peptide synthesis. By increasing the diffusion of both reagents and beads in a narrow dimension reactor, solid-phase reactions were done in seconds and medium-size peptides were synthesized in minutes.