Oligopeptides in anti-aging cosmetics stand out as active ingredients to interact with skin cell and accelerate the collagen synthesis and fibroblast proliferation. Some of them act as neurotransmitter- or enzyme inhibitor, while others are signal or carrier peptides.  It is of great significance for the quality control of the cosmetics industry to establish a single-molecule characterization method for the structure of different oligopeptides, which can be applied to the identification of oligopeptide active ingredients in different anti-aging products on the market.

Recently, the Chongqing Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Army Characteristic Medical Center have cooperated in the identification of anti-aging oligopeptides in cosmetics by combining solid-state nanopores with machine learning, and the relevant results entitled "Single-Molecule Resolution of Oligopeptides in Anti-aging Cosmetics Combined with Nanopore Readouts and Deep Learning" was published in Chem. Eng. J.

In order to identify the single-molecule structure of anti-aging oligopeptides in cosmetics, the research team used a solid-state nanochannel single-molecule platform combined with machine learning algorithms to distinguish and identify six ultra-short oligopeptides in cosmetics, which were applied to the identification and quality evaluation of the active ingredients of Argireline in cosmetic lyophilized powders of different companies (Fig. 1). This method can distinguish individual amino acid differences in the GdnHCl system. Subsequently, the MLP machine learning model was applied to improve the classification accuracy of the five oligopeptides to 90% in KCl. Argireline in cosmetic lyophilized powders of different companies could be identified and quality of the effective ingredient could be evaluated (Fig. 2). The "nanopore machine learning" detection scheme established in this study has effectively improved the accuracy of ultra-short oligopeptide molecular identification and signal analysis, and provided new tools and ideas for oligopeptide single-molecule analysis and precision medicine.

Fig.1 Nanopore Resolusion of Oligopeptides in Anti-Aging Cosmetics

Fig.2：Detection of hexapeptide in cosmetic products with nanopore