A comparison of rigid and flexible crosslinked polymer-supported peptide synthesis

To correlate the coupling difficulty and nature of the support in solid-phase peptide synthesis, a set of difficult peptides were built under identical conditions on rigid and hydrophobic divinyl benzene-crosslinked polystyrene (DVB-PS) and flexible and polar 1,4-butanediol dimethacrylate-crosslinked polystyrene (BDDMA-PS) resins of same functional capacity (∼2 mmol/g). The difficult coupling stages observed on each support were identified by monitoring the acylation time, coupling yield and deprotection efficiency. The yield and purity of the peptides prepared on BDDMA-PS were higher than when DVB-PS support was used.