Ligand dimerization programmed by hybridization to study multimeric ligand-receptor interactions.

Oligomerization of receptors induced or stabilized by polyvalent ligands is a fundamental mechanism in cellular recognition and signal transduction. Herein we report a general approach to encode complex peptide macrocycles with peptide nucleic acid (PNA) tags and program their oligomerization through hybridization as exemplified with a ligand binding to oligomeric DR5, a receptor of TRAIL cytokine.