RESUMO

Peptides are valuable for therapeutic development, with multicyclic peptides showing promise in mimicking antigen-binding potency of antibodies. However, our capability to engineer multicyclic peptide scaffolds, particularly for the construction of large combinatorial libraries, is still limited. Here, we study the interplay of disulfide pairing between three biscysteine motifs, and designed a range of triscysteine motifs with unique disulfide-directing capability for regulating the oxidative folding of multicyclic peptides. We demonstrate that incorporating these motifs into random sequences allows the design of disulfide-directed multicyclic peptide (DDMP) libraries with up to four disulfide bonds, which have been applied for the successful discovery of peptide binders with nanomolar affinity to several challenging targets. This study encourages the use of more diverse disulfide-directing motifs for creating multicyclic peptide libraries and opens an avenue for discovering functional peptides in sequence and structural space beyond existing peptide scaffolds, potentially advancing the field of peptide drug discovery.

Assuntos

Cisteína , Dissulfetos , Biblioteca de Peptídeos , Dissulfetos/química , Cisteína/química , Motivos de Aminoácidos , Descoberta de Drogas/métodos , Sequência de Aminoácidos , Peptídeos/química , Peptídeos/metabolismo , Peptídeos Cíclicos/química , Peptídeos Cíclicos/metabolismo , Ligação Proteica , Humanos , Oxirredução , Dobramento de Proteína

RESUMO

Disulfide-rich peptides (DRPs) are an interesting and promising molecular format for drug discovery and development. However, the engineering and application of DRPs rely on the foldability of the peptides into specific structures with correct disulfide pairing, which strongly hinders the development of designed DRPs with randomly encoded sequences. Design or discovery of new DRPs with robust foldability would provide valuable scaffolds for developing peptide-based probes or therapeutics. Herein we report a cell-based selection system leveraging cellular protein quality control (termed PQC-select) to select DRPs with robust foldability from random sequences. By correlating the foldability of DRPs with their expression levels on the cell surface, thousands of sequences that can fold properly have been successfully identified. We anticipated that PQC-select will be applicable to many other designed DRP scaffolds in which the disulfide frameworks and/or the disulfide-directing motifs can be varied, enabling the generation of a variety of foldable DRPs with new structures and superior potential for further developments.

RESUMO

Natural disulfide-rich peptides (DRPs) are valuable scaffolds for the development of new bioactive molecules and therapeutics. However, there are only a limited number of topologically distinct DRP folds in nature, and most of them suffer from the problem of in vitro oxidative folding. Thus, strategies to design DRPs with new constrained topologies beyond the scope of natural folds are desired. Herein we report a general evolution-inspired strategy to design new DRPs with diverse disulfide frameworks, which relies on the incorporation of two cysteine residues and a random peptide sequence into a precursor disulfide-stabilized fold. These peptides can spontaneously fold in redox buffers to the expected tricyclic topologies with high yields. Moreover, we demonstrated that these DRPs can be used as templates for the construction of phage-displayed peptide libraries, enabling the discovery of new DRP ligands from fully randomized sequences. This study thus paves the way for the development of new DRP ligands and therapeutics with structures not derived from natural DRPs.