Cyclic peptides have great potential as therapeutic agents and research tools. However, their applications against intracellular targets have been limited, because cyclic peptides are generally impermeable to the cell membrane. It was previously shown that fusion of cyclic peptides with a cyclic cell-penetrating peptide resulted in cell-permeable bicyclic peptides that are proteolytically stable and biologically active in cellular assays. In this work, we tested the generality of the bicyclic approach by synthesizing a combinatorial library of 5.7 × 106 bicyclic peptides featuring a degenerate sequence in the first ring and an invariant cell-penetrating peptide in the second ring. Screening of the library against oncoprotein K-Ras G12V followed by hit optimization produced a moderately potent and cell-permeable K-Ras inhibitor, which physically blocks the Ras-effector interactions in vitro, inhibits the signaling events downstream of Ras in cancer cells, and induces apoptosis of the cancer cells. Our approach should be generally applicable to developing cell-permeable bicyclic peptide inhibitors against other intracellular proteins.

Cyclic peptides are of considerable interests in drug discovery and nanotechnology. However, macrocyclization of peptides and other compounds has often been perceived as synthetically challenging and the cyclization yields are affected by several factors including the ring size, peptide sequence, and the reaction conditions. Through the screening of combinatorial peptide libraries, we analyzed the cyclization efficiency of >2 million peptide sequences to determine the effect of ring size, peptide sequence, and solvent on the backbone (N-to-C) cyclization of peptides. Our results show that on-resin cyclization of medium- and large-sized rings (cyclohexapeptides and above) with PyBOP is essentially quantitative for ≥99.96% of the sequences, with small amounts of dimer formation observed for <4% of these sequences. Cyclization of small rings (cyclotetrapeptides and cyclopentapeptides) is considerably more difficult and accompanied by significant cyclic dimer formation. Peptides that are difficult to cyclize are generally rich in Lys(Boc) and Arg(Pbf) residues as well as sterically hindered residues [e.g., Thr(tBu)] at the N-terminus. The majority of these difficult sequences can be cyclized to completion by the addition of aqueous additives to the cyclization reaction.

A robust, high-throughput method has been developed to screen one-bead-one-compound peptide libraries to systematically profile the sequence specificity of protein kinases. Its ability to provide individual sequences of the preferred substrates permits the identification of sequence contextual effects and non-permissive residues. Application of the library method to kinases Pim1, MKK6, and Csk revealed that Pim1 and Csk are highly active toward peptide substrates and recognize specific sequence motifs, whereas MKK6 has little activity or sequence selectivity against peptide substrates. Pim1 recognizes peptide substrates of the consensus RXR(H/R)X(S/T); it accepts essentially any amino acid at the S/T-2 and S/T+1 positions, but strongly disfavors acidic residues (Asp or Glu) at the S/T-2 position and a proline residue at the S/T+1 position. The selected Csk substrates show strong sequence covariance and fall into two classes with the consensus sequences of (D/E)EPIYφXφ and (D/E)(E/D)S(E/D/I)YφXφ (where X is any amino acid and φ is a hydrophobic amino acid). Database searches and in vitro kinase assays identified phosphatase PTP-PEST as a Pim1 substrate and phosphatase SHP-1 as a potential Csk substrate. Our results demonstrate that the sequence specificity of protein kinases is defined not only by favorable interactions between permissive residue(s) on the substrate and their cognate binding site(s) on the kinase, but also by repulsive interactions between the kinase and non-permissive residue(s).

Protein kinases phosphorylate specific serine, threonine, and/or tyrosine residues in their target proteins, resulting in functional changes of the target proteins such as enzymatic activity, cellular location, or association with other proteins. For many kinases, their in vivo substrate specificity is at least partially defined by the amino acid sequence surrounding the phosphorylatable residue (or sequence specificity). We report here a robust, high-throughput method for profiling the sequence specificity of protein kinases. Up to 10(7) different peptides are rapidly synthesized on PEGA beads in the one-bead-one-compound format and subjected to kinase reaction in the presence of [γ-S]ATP. Positive beads displaying the optimal kinase substrates are identified by covalently labeling the thiophosphorylated peptides with a fluorescent dye via a disulfide exchange reaction. Finally, the most active hit(s) is identified by the partial Edman degradation-mass spectrometry (PED-MS) method. The ability of this method to provide individual sequences of the preferred substrates permits the identification of sequence contextual effects and non-permissive residues. This method is applicable to protein serine, threonine, and tyrosine kinases.

Solid-supported chemical libraries have proven useful for the rapid and cost-effective discovery of bioactive compounds. However, traditional on-bead screening involves time-intensive chemical characterization of hit compounds and high false positive rates. Herein, we report a new platform for encoded chemical synthesis and solid-supported screening using p-Chips, microsized silicon microtransponders capable of storing and emitting unique numerical identifiers (IDs). By encoding the structures of library members using p-Chip IDs, we can track compound identities throughout both split-and-pool synthesis and protein binding assays without destructive cleavage. Thanks to the numerical IDs, our p-Chip platform can provide binding constants for library members simply by stripping and reprobing with different protein concentrations, unlike traditional on-bead assays. To showcase these features, we synthesized a library of 108 hemagglutinin (HA) peptide variants using split-and-pool approach, and measured ECs for each variant directly on p-Chips. On-chip ECs obtained from these studies showed excellent correlation (80%) with those obtained using traditional ELISA methods. Our screen also yielded a false positive rate of 14%, markedly superior to that reported for conventional bead-based binding studies (66-96%).1-9 On the basis of these results, we believe the p-Chip platform has the potential to improve the effectiveness of solid-supported high-throughput screening by a significant margin.