# Peptidic Catalysts Conformationally Tuned for Fluoride Binding and Delivery

## TL;DR

Researchers discovered that certain peptides can bind and deliver fluoride, enabling new fluorination reactions and offering insights into early enzyme-like catalysts.

## Contribution

The first experimental demonstration of peptide-based fluorination catalysis and the role of peptides as fluoride and cesium chelators.

## Key findings

- Peptides can bind fluoride and cesium ions, acting as chelators.
- Peptide-catalyzed fluorination reactions were successfully developed.
- This work opens new possibilities for fluorination chemistry using peptide catalysts.

## Abstract

Knowledge on how fluoride interacts with peptides is
currently
limited to in silico studies. Here, we report an
experimental investigation on the ability of peptidic scaffolds to
bind fluoride using TBAF·3H2O or CsF. For CsF, in-depth
NMR and GOAT-DFT studies shed light on peptides acting as chelators
to both fluoride and cesium ions. This finding led to the development
of the first peptide-catalyzed fluorination reactions. These advances
open a new avenue to investigate fluorination chemistry with peptide-based
catalysts that are considered as the possible ancestors to enzymes.