Designing cyclic peptides! Congrats UW IPD, Cyrus Co-Founders Yifan Song & David Baker

Scientists in the UW IPD and David Baker’s lab there have been designing mini-proteins up to 120 residues over the last few years, in a slew of exciting research papers in protein design. Now for the first time they’ve designed short cyclic peptides in the range 18-47 residues — constrained for example by N to C terminal cyclization. Cyclic peptides in nature have evolved into a wide variety of binding modalities, and they are therefore of great interest as drug candidates. Twelve cyclic peptides are designed and have their structures confirmed by experimental methods in this tour de force manuscript. Cyrus co-founder Yifan Song is a co-author on this combined computational and wet lab work.

Read the original article at Nature’s website:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature19791.html