History
Peptide history: a timeline
From the first two-amino-acid chain to peptides coded inside mitochondria.
The first synthetic peptide
Emil Fischer and Ernest Fourneau made glycylglycine, a dipeptide of two glycines. It's considered the beginning of peptide chemistry.
Peptides get their name
On 22 September 1902, Fischer introduced the word "peptide", from the Greek for digestion. That same year he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for his work on sugars and purines.
The first peptide hormone made in a lab
Vincent du Vigneaud showed that oxytocin is nine amino acids long, then made it from scratch. It won him the 1955 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
An idea in a notebook
Bruce Merrifield wrote that the world needed a fast, automatic way to make long peptides. His answer was to build the chain on a solid bead.
An enzyme built by hand
Merrifield's lab built the enzyme ribonuclease A by adding its 124 amino acids one at a time.
GHK found in human blood
Loren Pickart discovered GHK, a three-amino-acid peptide with a strong natural attraction to copper.
Thymosin α1 sequenced
Allan Goldstein's team mapped a 28-amino-acid peptide from the thymus gland of calves.
Nobel Prize for solid-phase synthesis
Merrifield won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the bead method, now used in peptide labs worldwide.
A peptide coded in mitochondria
Scientists including Changhan Lee and Pinchas Cohen found MOTS-c, a 16-amino-acid peptide whose instructions sit in mitochondrial DNA. That DNA was known to code for only 13 proteins, so it was a surprise.