ORGN 220 |
| The Periodic Table represents a remarkable way to organize one's thinking about chemistry. Emil Fischer, Vincent du Vigneaud, Frederick Sanger, Ralph Hirschmann, Bruce Merrifield, and their scientific heirs have all parlayed their knowledge of organic chemistry to make breakthroughs in our understanding of the diverse structure and biology of peptides and proteins. Our challenge is to convey the rich wonder, legacy, and future of the field to beginning investigators who naively view the objects of our study merely as mundane combinations of amide bonds. This lecture will survey how, in three decades at the bench, the unique reactivities and selectivities of at least two dozen elements (beyond the obvious carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen) have been exploited in a variety of ways. The particular focus will be on sulfur and silicon. Sulfur appears in natural products and plays interesting functional and architectural roles; it can be manipulated under mild conditions toward useful ends in functional group protection and activation. Silicon is applied as a temporary adjunct that facilitates useful and sometimes counter-intuitive outcomes. Examples from our published work span amino acid derivatization chemistries (including mechanistic aspects), orthogonally cleavable handles and polymeric supports for solid-phase synthesis methodologies, and the construction of complex, fragile peptides, conjugates, and small proteins that allow insights into conformational issues, folding, and stability. |
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Ralph F. Hirschmann Award in Peptide Chemistry
1:30 PM-5:00 PM, Monday, 27 March 2006 Georgia World Congress Center -- C303/304/305, Oral
Division of Organic Chemistry |