Carbonless amino acids and a carbonless GHK peptide

Compound: GHK Citation: Skurski P, Anusiewicz I. Phys Chem Chem Phys. 2026;28(14):8675-8691. PubMed

Summary

This is a theoretical, computational chemistry paper. It includes no cell, animal or human experiments, and it does not test hydrogels or wound healing. The authors explore “carbonless” biomolecules: they systematically replace carbon atoms with boron and nitrogen while keeping the same electron count. They apply this to glycine, histidine, lysine and the tripeptide GHK, then use computer models to predict the shapes and copper binding of the resulting analogues.

Key Findings

• DFT calculations (ωB97XD/aug-cc-pVDZ with aqueous solvation), supported by CREST conformer sampling, identified unique low-energy carbonless building blocks: cGly, cHis and cLys
• These were used to build cGHK, a carbonless analogue of GHK
• cGHK is predicted to have a broader range of shapes than GHK under physiological aqueous conditions, meaning it is more conformationally flexible
• Cu(II) binding was modeled with an experimentally supported 3N1O binding motif that includes one water ligand
• The modeling indicates cGHK stabilizes Cu(II) more strongly than GHK (ΔGexch = -6.24 kcal/mol at 298 K)

Relevance to GHK

This paper is only indirectly relevant. It uses GHK’s copper(II) binding as a reference point, which touches the chemistry behind GHK-Cu, but the compound it studies (cGHK) is a computationally designed boron–nitrogen analogue, not GHK. It provides no evidence about GHK’s effects on skin, wounds or healing.

PubMed

See Also

• Parent compound: GHK
• GHK-Cu