Development of a new peptide moiety routinely involves a multitude of repetitive steps in an extended synthetic pathway. Every step requires precise control of reaction conditions to achieve the desired product in as high yield and purity as possible. Traditionally this has required purification of milligram scale quantities of the final peptide and is achieved through semi-preparative high performance liquid chromatography followed by mass spectrometric confirmation.
We now discuss techniques to improve the synthesis of various novel peptides and the development of high performance flash purification chromatography techniques to effectively and efficiently purify multi-gram scale peptides. This includes mass-directed identification and collection to definitively isolate the desired product from side products including deletion and truncated sequences within the crude reaction mixture. Accurate molecular weight of the final product can then be confirmed by mass spectrometry.