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A Specialist Periodical Report
Amino Acids and Peptides Volume 22 A Review of the Literature Published during 1989 Senior Reporter
J. H. Jones, University of Oxford Reporters G. C. Barrett, Oxford Polytechnic J. S. Davies, University College of Swansea D. T. Elmore, University of Oxford P. M. Hardy, University of Exeter R. W. Hay, University of St Andrews K. B. Nolan, The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland C. H. Frydrych, Beecham Pharmaceuticals
ISBN 0-85 186-204-7 ISSN 0269-7521 @
The Royal Society of Chemistry, 1991
All Rights Reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form of by any means - graphic, electronic, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems - without written permission fiom the Royal Society of Chemistry
Published by the Royal Society of Chemistry Thomas Graham House, Cambridge CB4 4WF Printed and bound in England by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd.
Preface
During the year under review, peptide science continued its relentless growth. Output still increases, beyond, it seems, control. What might loosely be called straight peptide chemistry has more than five thousand workers engaged in it full-time, producing around a thousand publications a year and flocking to international meetings in their hundreds. Furthermore, what is published on some topics is, as we all know, less complete (and sometimes, one suspects, less interesting) than that which is not, because commercial considerations impose paranoid secrecy. With the subject now so extensive, and'its aficionados so numerous, the emergence of specialised societies was inevitable. Many countries have had semi-formal peptide discussion groups for some time (the UK Peptide and Protein Group was initiated under the auspices of the Chemical and Biochemical Societies as long ago as 1968), and an informal European Peptide Committee has been organising symposia for over thirty years. This movement has now gone a stage further with the formation of, and approval of governing statutes for, a European Peptide Society, in 1989; this was followed by similar formalitites for the birth of an American Peptide Society and a Japanese Peptide Society, both early in 1990. In only a few months the enrolment of the European Peptide Society had risen to over seven hundred, powerful evidence of the field's strength.
Balliol College. Oxford
John Jones
Contents
Chapter 1
Amino Acids By G