Peptides are enormously important to biological and proteomic research, but classical chemistry provides no easy way to synthesize them, making the potential impact of this discovery very significant.

With these alternative methods, Li and his colleagues have discovered an entirely new way of synthesizing peptides using simple reagents, a process that would be impossible in classical chemistry.

This review focuses on peptide segment ligation for synthesis of peptides and proteins. Ligation is a new methodology in peptide and protein synthesis chemistry.