Antibacterial Peptides

Antibacterial Peptides: A Review

Antibacterial peptides (APs), small molecules composed of less than fifty amino acid residues, are important components of the innate immune system. APs are produced by almost all living organisms in a defense strategy against invading pathogens. APs can be divided into many subtypes following different criteria: origin, size, structure, mechanism of action, etc... Despite their great diversity...

Cathelicidin Family of Antibacterial Peptides

Antibacterial peptides from thermophilic bacteria

It is becoming interestingly apparent that innovations of the classical antibiotics are not effective, that induces need for novel drugs. Peptide antibiotics exhibit a group of secondary metabolites with hydrophobic and cyclic structures containing d-amino acidc like compounds with more resistant to proteolytic degradation. Bacterial peptides can possess bactericidal, fungicidal, metal chelatin...

Stimuli-responsive self-assembling peptides made from antibacterial peptides.

How to use bioactive peptide sequences as fundamental building blocks to make hydrogel materials which are stimuli-responsive? In this article, we provide a novel designed peptide comprising two antibacterial peptide sequences (KIGAKI)3-NH2 and a central tetrapeptide linker. Results show that balancing the forces of the electrostatic repulsion of the charged lysine residues against the hydropho...

Designing Antibacterial Peptides with Enhanced Killing Kinetics

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are gaining attention as substitutes for antibiotics in order to combat the risk posed by multi-drug resistant pathogens. Several research groups are engaged in design of potent anti-infective agents using natural AMPs as templates. In this study, a library of peptides with high sequence similarity to Myeloid Antimicrobial Peptide (MAP) family were screened using p...