Key Technology

Introduction of PICT

Invented in Zonsen Biotech, the essence of PICT  (Peptide  Information Compression Technology) is to make efficient use of the biochemical property of cyclic peptides so that one cyclic peptide could contain the amino acid sequence information of very large number of peptides. As a result, a library with about 80,000 cyclic 80-mer peptide compounds will contain about 500,000,000 different peptide sequence information.

Concept of complete peptide library

A complete peptide library refers to a collection of peptides which embodies all possible natural amino acid sequences based on the peptide size. For example, all possible different tripeptides include 203 = 8000 peptides, while all possible different tetrapeptides include 204 = 16,000 peptides, thus a complete tripeptide library must have 8000 distinctive peptides and a complete tetrapeptide library must have 16, 000 distinctive peptides.

Information compression efficiency of PICT

As shown below, a linear tripeptide with 3 different amino acids contains 2 different dipeptides, while a cyclic tripeptide contains 3 different dipeptides. Based on this principle, using 70-mer cyclic peptide as example, we can design a 70-mer cyclic peptide which will include 70 different dipeptides, 70 different tripeptides, 70 different tetrapeptides, and so on and so forth, all the way up to 70 different 70-mer peptides. The result is one 70-mer cyclic peptide could contain amino acid sequence information of 4830 different peptides. In another word, a 70-mer cyclic peptide library constructed in this way renders an amazing compression ratio of 4830 for the embedded amino acid sequence information. For an 80-mer cyclic peptide, the compression efficiency will be even higher.

Illustration of peptide library construction process

Comparison to other technologies

PICT peptide library has the following advantages when compared to a traditional chemically synthesized peptide library:

Phage display is another popular technology to make peptide libraries. Although the capacity of these libraries is generally huge, the nature as compound mixtures is troublesome. We think PICT peptide library at least exhibits these outstanding features when compared to this kind of mixture libraries: