Seminar Series : Folding biomimetic peptoid polymers into protein-like nanostructures

A longstanding challenge in molecular biomimicry is to build synthetic nanostructures with the same architectural sophistication as proteins. One of the most promising approaches is to synthesize sequence-defined, non-natural polymer chains that, like in Nature, spontaneously fold and assemble into precise three-dimensional structures. 30 years ago, this was a daunting synthetic problem, but with the advent of the automated solid-phase submonomer synthesis method for peptoids in 1992, we can now efficiently synthesize high-purity, sequence-defined peptoid polymers up to and beyond 50 monomers in length. The method uses readily available primary amine synthons, allowing hundreds of chemically diverse side chains to be cheaply introduced.