High-affinity Cyclic Peptide Matriptase Inhibitors

Combinatorial Optimization of Cystine-Knot Peptides towards High-Affinity Inhibitors of Human Matriptase-1

Cystine-knot miniproteins define a class of bioactive molecules with several thousand natural members. Their eponymous motif comprises a rigid structured core formed by six disulfide-connected cysteine residues, which accounts for its exceptional stability towards thermic or proteolytic degradation. Since they display a remarkable sequence tolerance within their disulfide-connected loops, these...

Evolution of cyclic peptide protease inhibitors.

We report a bacterial system for the evolution of cyclic peptides that makes use of an expanded set of amino acid building blocks. Orthogonal aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase/tRNA(CUA) pairs, together with a split intein system were used to biosynthesize a library of ribosomal peptides containing amino acids with unique structures and reactivities. This peptide library was subsequently used to evolve ...

Small peptide inhibitors disrupt a high-affinity interaction between cytoplasmic dynein and a viral cargo protein.

Several viruses target the microtubular motor system in early stages of the viral life cycle. African swine fever virus (ASFV) protein p54 hijacks the microtubule-dependent transport by interaction with a dynein light chain (DYNLL1/DLC8). This was shown to be a high-affinity interaction, and the residues gradually disappearing were mapped on DLC8 to define a putative p54 binding surface by nucl...

Genetically selected cyclic-peptide inhibitors of AICAR transformylase homodimerization.

Design and synthesis of potent, selective inhibitors of matriptase.

Matriptase is a member of the type II transmembrane serine protease family. Several studies have reported deregulated matriptase expression in several types of epithelial cancers, suggesting that matriptase constitutes a potential target for cancer therapy. We report herein a new series of slow, tight-binding inhibitors of matriptase, which mimic the P1-P4 substrate recognition sequence of the ...