This page highlights the important aspects of peptide synthesis, the most common methods of synthesis and purification and the strengths and limitations of the respective strategies. The benefit of peptide synthesis strategies today is that besides having the ability to make peptides that are found in biological specimens, creativity and imagination can be tapped to generate unique peptides to optimize a desired biological response or other result. In the last 50 years, advances in protein synthesis chemistry and methods have developed to the point where peptide synthesis today is a common approach in even high-throughput biological research and product and drug development (2).

The ability to form peptide bonds to link amino acids together is over 100 years old, although the first peptides to be synthesized, including oxytocin and insulin, did not occur for another 50-60 years, demonstrating the difficult task of chemically synthesizing chains of amino acids (1). While there is no definitive definition of a peptide, it usually refers to flexible (little secondary structure) chains of up to 30-50 amino acids. Peptide synthesis is characterized as the formation of a peptide bond between two amino acids.

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