Friday, December 13, 2013

Understanding Custom Peptides

By Armand Zeiders


Custom peptide synthesis is a service provided to scientists all over the world. These scientists use these custom peptides to help them further medical studies and biological research. These custom peptides, which are created in a biotechnology laboratory, are important for a number of reasons. Here is some information about peptides and custom synthetic peptides.

Understanding peptides in general is basic biology. These are just a short chain of amino acids which bond together to form peptides. Those chains containing 50 or less amino acids are called peptides, and the long chains of amino acids are what we call proteins. Amino acids are organic compounds that are important for the human body to function properly and there are about 500 various kinds of these amino acids. Some essential amino acids can be produced by the body and others we must receive from various food sources.

Peptide synthesis is simply the process by which peptides are formed. This process occurs naturally in our bodies, and scientists certainly can study natural peptides, however this is much more difficult and more expensive to obtain which is why synthetic peptides often are studied instead. However, creating these custom synthetic peptides is a difficult and time-consuming process, which is why labs often outsource this work to biotechnology firms.

Studying peptides has been helpful to scientists for a variety of reasons. Peptides, for instance, can be used to help researchers study the function and structure of different types of protein. Many scientists believe that many disorders and diseases occur to do problems with our proteins so studying the proteins hopefully will yield advances in dealing with the diseases, which include Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia.

A peptide that is called an inhibitory peptide is thoroughly studied these days because scientists believe that these are peptides that will inhibit the growth of some cancer proteins. This inhibitory peptide is seen as one that can be used to kill cancer cells and hopefully create a treatment that is without the side effects often happening in other cancer treatments like chemotherapy and radiation.

Studying synthetic custom peptides is also done by scientists because of the belief that they can produce and create vaccines and also other diagnostic tests with these types of peptides. Scientists believe that they can make it easier to isolate and solve people's medical problems and give them a healthier and happier future, with understanding these complex molecular structures of amino acids, proteins, and also peptides.




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