ABSTRACT
Synthetic peptides are ubiquitous in biology, biomedicine, drug discovery, and many other elds. Chemically synthesized peptides serve very diverse purposes, including as biopharmaceutical drugs and for epitope mapping, peptide microarrays, and vaccine development. While proteins are generally prepared by recombinant methods, chemical synthesis is the prevailing method for the preparation of peptides. This is due to the ease, predictability, and exibility of chemical synthesis, which also allows the convenient incorporation of many nonproteinogenic modications. Peptide synthesis has allowed the preparation of numerous peptides, both on a laboratory scale and on a ton scale. However, there are also limitations-or current limitations, if you will-and having an understanding of the possibilities as well as the limitations will allow the biomedical users to better incorporate synthetic peptides in their research and applications. This chapter will provide an introduction to some of the most common methods in solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS), but will also briey introduce solution synthesis of peptides and some other methods.
