| dc.description.abstract | Many cancers, including breast and pancreatic, are known to display similar cancer stem cell markers, and the CD44 receptor is a common marker. The receptor binds specific biomolecules that lead to increased cell proliferation and survival. Boronophenylalanine, a noncanonical amino acid, is of interest because of boronic acid's novel and robust chemical properties, and its functional group boronic acid’s ability to participated in reversible chemistry allows for recycling of protein targets and avoidance of immunogenic responses in vivo. Phage display will be the experimental tool for studying ligand capabilities of boronophenylalanine-containing peptides with CD44. Boronophenylalanine incorporation has been successfully tested using a sfGFP model, and two of the three plasmids required for phage production have been transformed into a top 10 cell line using microbiology techniques. Current efforts are towards transforming said cell line with the final plasmid and producing phages. After at least 3 rounds of selection and amplification, we hope produce a boronophenylalanine-incorporated heptapeptide library, and through sequencing of the phages, we hope to gain insight about this noncanonical amino acid’s integration into peptides in developing reversible covalent inhibitors of CD44. | |
