Discovery may help boost peptide design

Peptides – short strings of amino acids – play a vital role in health and industry, with a huge range of medical uses, including in antibiotics, anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer drugs. They are also used in the cosmetics industry and for enhancing athletic performance.

Altering the structure of natural peptides to produce improved compounds is therefore of great interest to scientists and industry. But how the machineries that produce these peptides work still isn’t clearly understood.

EMBL Australia and Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) group leader Associate Professor Max Cryle has revealed a key aspect of peptide machineries in a paper published in Nature Communications this week.