Our lab also focuses on the synthesis and biological evaluation of non-natural amino acids. The incorporation of non-natural amino acids into polypeptide chains has been shown to improve their biological and pharmacological properties, such as improved therapeutic half-life or modulated immunogenicity. Our synthesis of these amino acids is attractive because we start from relatively cheap and abundantly available starting materials and once again we utilize enzymes in these syntheses for chiral resolution of the racemates thus synthesized. This provides efficient methods for the synthesis of enantio-enriched non-natural amino acids, specifically those containing pyrazole or triazole nuclei. ß-(pyrazole-1-yl)-L-alanine, a non-protein amino acid, which is found in watermelon seeds serves as the template for which the syntheses are constructed.