It is mainly divided into medical polypeptide drugs, peptide antibiotics, vaccines, agricultural antibacterial peptides, feed small peptides, daily cosmetics, food soybean peptides, corn peptides, yeast peptides and sea cucumber peptides.
From the functional point of view, it can be divided into antihypertensive peptides, antioxidant peptides, cholesterol-lowering peptides, opioid peptides, high F-value oligopeptides, strong food peptides and so on.
Active peptides are closely related to nutrition, hormones, enzyme inhibition, immune regulation, antibacterial, antiviral and antioxidant activities. Polypeptides are generally divided into: polypeptide drugs and polypeptide health products. Traditional polypeptide drugs are mainly polypeptide hormones. 20 1 1 The development of polypeptide drugs has developed into various fields of disease prevention and treatment, especially the following fields.
Antitumor polypeptide
The occurrence of tumor is the result of many factors, but it ultimately involves the regulation of oncogene expression. 20 13 found many tumor-related genes and regulatory factors. Screening peptides that specifically bind to these genes and regulatory factors has become a new hotspot in the search for anticancer drugs. For example, somatostatin has been used to treat endocrine tumors in the digestive system; American scholars have found a hexapeptide that can significantly inhibit adenocarcinoma in vivo; Swiss scientists have discovered an octapeptide that can induce apoptosis of tumor cells.
Antiviral polypeptide
Viruses adsorb cells by binding to specific receptors on host cells, and rely on their own specific proteases for protein processing and nucleic acid replication. Therefore, peptides that bind to host cell receptors or peptides that can bind to active sites such as viral proteases can be screened from peptide libraries for antiviral therapy. 20 13 Canada, Italy and other countries have screened many small peptides with antiviral properties from peptide libraries, and some small peptides have entered the clinical trial stage. In June, 2004, the Institute of Microbiology of China Academy of Sciences reported that the project "Study on the Fusion Mechanism and Fusion Inhibitors of SARS Coronavirus Cells" undertaken by the Institute of Microbiology of China Academy of Sciences had made great progress in cooperation with the Modern Virology Research Center of Wuhan University. Experiments show that the designed HR2 polypeptide can effectively inhibit the infection of SARS virus to cultured cells, and the effective inhibition concentration is at several nanomolar levels. Important progress has also been made in virus infection inhibition experiment and in vitro binding experiment of HR 1 with HR2. The polypeptide drug developed to prevent SARS virus fusion can prevent virus infection and prevent the virus from spreading further in the body for patients infected with the virus. The polypeptide medicine has dual functions of prevention and treatment. Researchers from the Cell Engineering Research Center of the Fourth Military Medical University have synthesized nine kinds of peptides that can effectively prevent and inhibit SARS virus from invading cells.
Cytokine mimetic peptide
Since 20 1 1, it has become a hot research topic at home and abroad to screen cytokine mimetic peptides from peptide libraries by using known cytokine receptors. Many growth factor mimetic peptides have been screened abroad, such as human erythropoietin, human thrombopoietin, human growth hormone, human nerve growth factor, interleukin-1 and so on. The amino acid sequences of these mimetic peptides are different from their corresponding cytokines, but they have the activity of cytokines and have the advantage of low molecular weight. 20 13 these cytokine mimetic peptides are in preclinical or clinical research stage.
Antimicrobial active peptide
When insects are stimulated by the external environment, they will produce a large number of cationic peptides with antibacterial activity, and 20 13 screened out more than 100 antibacterial peptides. In vitro and in vivo experiments have proved that many antimicrobial peptides not only have strong antibacterial and bactericidal abilities, but also can kill tumor cells.
Polypeptide vaccine
Polypeptide vaccine and nucleic acid vaccine are one of the more important research aspects in the field of 20 13 vaccine research. 20 13 A great deal of research and development has been done on virus polypeptide vaccine in the world. For example, 1999, NIH announced the clinical trial results of two HIV-I virus polypeptide vaccines in human body; Foreign scholars screened a polypeptide from the outer membrane protein E2 of hepatitis C virus (HCV), which can stimulate the body to produce protective antibodies. The United States is developing malaria multivalent antigen polypeptide vaccine; Cervical cancer human papillomavirus polypeptide vaccine has entered the second phase of clinical trials. China has also done a lot of work in the research of various polypeptide vaccines.
Diagnostic polypeptide
The main use of peptides in diagnostic reagents is as antigens to detect antibodies of corresponding pathogenic organisms. Polypeptide antigen is more specific than natural microorganism or parasite protein antigen, and it is easy to prepare. 20 13 antibody detection reagents assembled with polypeptide antigens include: detection reagents for hepatitis A, B, C, G virus, HIV, human cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex virus, rubella virus, Treponema pallidum, cysticercosis, trypanosoma, Lyme disease and rheumatoid disease. Most of the polypeptide antigens used were obtained by analysis and screening in the natural protein of the corresponding pathogen, and some of them were brand-new peptides screened in the peptide library.