Oral Presentation 8th Modern Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis & Its Applications Symposium 2022

A chameleonic macrocyclic seed peptide with drug development applications (#21)

K. Johan Rosengren 1 , Colton Payne 1 , Bastian Franke 1 , Fatemeh Hajiaghaalipour 1 , Mark F Fisher 2 , Grishma Vadlamani 2 , Courtney E McAleese 1 , Rodney F Minchin 1 , Charles S Bond 1 , Richard J Clark 1 , Joshua S Mylne 2 3
  1. School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
  2. School of Chemistry and Biochemistry & ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia
  3. Centre for Crop and Disease Management, Curtin University, Bentley, WA, Australia

Macrocyclic peptides with a head-to-tail cyclized backbone are intriguing natural products with interesting properties. A family of macrocyclic peptides named PawS-Derived Peptides (PDPs) is produced from precursors of seed storage albumins in species of the sunflower family. Un unusual member is PDP-23 from Zinnia elegans, which at 28 amino acids and with two disulfide bonds is twice size of typical PDPs. We produced PDP-23 by solid phase peptide synthesis and used two-dimensional solution NMR spectroscopy to elucidate its structural features. It adopts a unique structure in which two β-hairpins, each stabilized by one of the disulfide bonds, are connected by turns that act as hinges. In water two PDP-23 molecules form a symmetric dimer enclosing a hydrophobic core, while addition of organic co-solvent results in a monomeric clam-shaped tertiary structure, and in the presence of micelles the clam opens up allow insertion of hydrophobic residues into the micelle. Chemical synthesis of the mirror image d-PDP-23 allowed us to confirm the dimeric structure using racemic crystallography. An ability to alter structure based on environment may offer advantages over more rigid disulfide-rich scaffolds in drug development and we have demonstrated this by conjugating a rhodamine dye to PDP-23 to create a stable, cell permeable inhibitor of the P-glycoprotein drug efflux pump, which is upregulated in many chemo resistant cancer cells.