Bacterial resistance to conventional antibiotics is currently a real problem all over the world, making novel antimicrobial compounds a real research priority. Some of the most promising compounds found to date are antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). The benefits of these drugs include their broad spectrum of activity that affects several microbial processes, making the emergence of resistance less ...

In an era of discrete tube or transistor op-amp modules, any potential advantage to be gained from fully-differential circuitry was masked by primitive op-amp module performance. Fullydifferential output op-amps were abandoned in favor of single ended op-amps. Fully-differential op-amps were all but forgotten, even when IC technology was developed. The main reason appears to be the simplicity o...

Autonomous mobile programs (AMPs) have been proposed for load management in dynamic networks. An AMP is aware of its resource needs and periodically seeks a better location in the network to reduce execution time. AMPs have previously been measured using mobile Java Voyager on local area networks (LANs). We have constructed a simulation model of AMPs and reproduced 4 sets of experiments on homo...

Black tiger shrimp Penaeus monodon is one of the major shrimp species being cultured in Asian countries. Disease outbreaks have resulted in a decline of P. monodon cultivation and severe losses in the shrimp production. To combat harmful microorganisms, shrimp produce diverse classes of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) as part of their immune defense. In P. monodon, several cDNA sequences of AMPs ...

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are part of the armament that insects have developed to fight off pathogens. Insect AMPs are typically cationic and often made of less than 100 amino acid residues. Although their structures are diverse, most of the AMPs can be assigned to a limited number of families. The most common structures are represented by peptides assuming a alpha-helical conformation in o...

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are ancient and conserved across the tree of life. Their efficacy over evolutionary time has been largely attributed to their mechanisms of killing. Yet, the understanding of their pharmacodynamics both in vivo and in vitro is very limited. This is, however, crucial for applications of AMPs as drugs and also informs the understanding of the action of AMPs in natura...

Although simple and low-cost interventions for sickle cell disease (SCD) exist in many developing countries, child mortality associated with SCD remains high, in part, because of the lack of access to diagnostic tests for SCD. A density-based test using aqueous multiphase systems (SCD-AMPS) is a candidate for a low-cost, point-of-care diagnostic for SCD. In this paper, the field evaluation of S...

Sinorhizobium meliloti differentiates into persisting, nitrogen-fixing bacteroids within root nodules of the legume Medicago truncatula. Nodule-specific cysteine-rich antimicrobial peptides (NCR AMPs) and the bacterial BacA protein are essential for bacteroid development. However, the bacterial factors central to the NCR AMP response and the in planta role of BacA are unknown. We investigated t...

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are a promising class of antimicrobial agents that have been garnering increasing attention as resistance renders many conventional antibiotics ineffective. Extensive research has resulted in a large library of highly-active AMPs. However, several issues serve as an impediment to their clinical development, not least the issue of host toxicity. An approach that may...

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have been proposed as a novel class of antimicrobials that could aid the fight against antibiotic resistant bacteria. The mode of action of AMPs as acting on the bacterial cytoplasmic membrane has often been presented as an enigma and there are doubts whether the membrane is the sole target of AMPs. Progress has been made in clarifying the possible targets of these...