A simple and effective method for producing nonrandom peptide libraries using cotton as a carrier in continuous flow peptide synthesizers

A method has been developed for generating nonrandom peptide libraries on cotton. Disks of cotton fabric were chemically modified to enable peptide synthesis. Incorporation of a 6-aminocaproic acid residue handle on the cellulose turned out to be advantageous. Disks were labeled with silver ink, stacked one on top of another in a continuous flow peptide synthesizer column, and simultaneously subjected to automated synthesis procedures. Depending on the sequences to be synthesized, the automatic synthesis procedure was stopped, and the disks were removed from the column, sorted, and reapplied to subsequent synthesis steps. In this way, individual peptides could be easily prepared in milligram quantities on each of the cotton disks.