MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort

Leader-Independent C-Terminal Modification by a Radical <i>S</i> -Adenosyl- <scp>l</scp> -methionine Maturase Enables Macrocyclic GLP-1-Like Peptides

2025· article· en· W4415167573 on OpenAlex
Jacob Pedigo, Karsten A. S. Eastman, Vahe Bandarian

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueACS Bio & Med Chem Au · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicChemical Synthesis and Analysis
Canadian institutionsAegera Therapeutics (Canada)
FundersNational Institute of General Medical SciencesNational Institutes of Health
KeywordsEnzymePeptidePeptide BiosynthesisBiocatalysisSequence (biology)Substrate (aquarium)Cyclic peptide

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide Ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) are a rapidly expanding family of natural products in which biosynthetic maturase enzymes tailor ribosomal precursors into bioactive products. Classical RiPP maturation relies on an N-terminal leader sequence in the precursor peptide and a complementary RiPP-recognition element in the enzyme to guide substrate binding. Herein, we interrogated PapB, a radical S -adenosyl- l -methionine RiPP maturase known to introduce thio(seleno)-ether cross-links and discovered that its catalytic reach extends well beyond this paradigm. PapB efficiently processes substrates that lack any canonical leader sequence, demonstrating bona fide leader-independent activity. To highlight the practical value of this capability, we applied PapB to three therapeutically relevant analogues of glucagon-like peptide pathway agonists to generate C-terminal cyclic structures. In every case, the enzyme achieved complete conversion of the linear to the thioether macrocyclized peptide. These results establish PapB as a versatile, plug-and-play biocatalyst for late-stage macrocyclization of structurally diverse peptides, opening a direct route to conformationally constrained therapeutic candidates without the need for leader tags.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.085
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.248
Teacher spread0.240 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it