A New Staple: Peptide-Targeted Covalent Inhibitors.

In this issue of Cell Chemical Biology, Huhn et al. (2016) unveil a clever strategy for selectively and irreversibly inhibiting an anti-apoptotic protein, BFL-1. The authors describe stapled peptides bearing carefully placed electrophiles that target a unique cysteine residue in BFL-1 via covalent modification, thus representing an extension of the stapled peptide concept into the covalent inhibitor space.