What are peptide sets?
Peptide sets are individual peptides, produced by a fully automated small scale synthesis on resin in individual wells. The scale can be chosen from 2 to 5 µmole which is about 2 to 7 mg of a 15 amino acid long peptide. Peptide sets are supplied without any purification - as they are synthesised. In doing so, hundreds of peptides can be produced in a few days to weeks (depending on the number of sets). Because the purity of peptide sets can not be as high as for HPLC purified peptides, they are primarily useful as a screening tool. If the peptide of interest has been found by initial screening it can be synthesised at a larger scale, HPLC purified and used for further studies.

What are the applications of peptide sets?
Peptide sets are efficient tools for the screening of epitopes (B-cell (antibodies), T-cell), proteases, kinases, pharmacologically active peptides and to address many other biochemical or immunological questions. In many cases, the use of peptide sets is an economic alternative to recombinant protein approaches.

How are the peptide sets supplied?
Peptide sets are delivered in a 96-tube rack, each peptide in an individual tube with a volume of 1.2 ml. The peptides are delivered lyophilised. Ambient temperature should not be a problem for the lyophilised peptides. However, for maximum stability the peptide sets should be stored at -20°C.

Why are peptide sets not purified?
Purification of peptides is an expensive and time consuming task. We do not purify our peptide set because we would like to support you with a cost effective tool for fast screening purposes. For many applications the purity of a peptide set is sufficient for the first screening. Confirmation experiments of positive peptides should be done with purified sequences.

What is the purity of a peptide set?
The purity of all peptides in a set is hard to predict. There are some points that could be of interest for the design of a peptide set:

• The overall purity of a peptide decreases with increasing length of the sequence. Often peptides with a length of 15 amino acids are sufficient for the experiments. These shorter peptides (10 to 15 residues) are synthesised at a higher purity than peptides with a length of >20 amino acids.
• Peptides with many hydrophobic residues are more difficult to synthesise and to dissolve in aqueous buffers, used for biological assays.
• Some useful hints may be found in our synthetic peptide checklist.
  

Is there a way to purify peptide sets?
Yes, there is a good way if peptides are bound to surfaces for your assays. The peptide sets can be synthesised with terminal biotin or thiole group (SH). These groups can be bound to either streptavidin coated surfaces (biotinylated peptides) or to gold and maleimide surfaces (peptides with free HS-group). Surfaces may be beads, microtiter plates or planar surfaces (e.g. microarrays or BIAcore-chips).
During the synthesis all truncated sequences will be acetylated. Only the full length peptides bear the biotin of thiole group at their N-terminus. After the surface-binding all truncated sequences can be removed by simple washing steps.