Third year PhD student in the Alewood group, Markus Muttenthaler, was awarded the best student oral presentation award at the recent RACI Biomolecular Division meeting at Couran Cove. His presentation entitled " Selenocysteine in peptide folding and drug design" elegantly described the use of selenocysteine in solid phase peptide chemistry as a means of disulfide bond replacement that enables selective bond formation without loss of structure and with stablisation towards proteases.
His work will be published in the near future and follows on from work described in J Biol Chem. 2006 May 19;281(20):14136-43. Epub 2006 Feb 24.