Benefits compared with normal synthesis in a liquid state include: The reaction can be driven to completion and high yields through the use of excess reagent.
The process was originally developed in the 1950s and 1960s by Robert Bruce Merrifield in order to synthesise peptide chains,[4] and which was the basis for his 1984 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
In addition, this step makes it easy to purify the synthesised compound after cleavage from the bead.
Usually, peptides are synthesised from the carbonyl group side (C-terminus) to amino group side (N-terminus) of the amino acid chain in the SPPS method, although peptides are biologically synthesised in the opposite direction in cells.
In peptide synthesis, an amino-protected amino acid is bound to a solid phase material or resin (most commonly, low cross-linked polystyrene beads), forming a covalent bond between the carbonyl group and the resin, most often an amido or an ester bond.
Relatively short fragments of DNA, RNA, and modified oligonucleotides are also synthesised by the solid-phase method.