Defensins are a family of secreted antimicrobial peptides proposed to directly interfere with bacterial membranes. Here we show a functional analysis of the novel -defensin DEFB123. A peptide comprising the -defensin core region was synthesized and used for our analysis. Like other -defensins, DEFB123 exerted antimicrobial activity against a broad spectrum of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bac...

BACKGROUND Huntington's disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disorder caused by the abnormal expansion of a CAG triplet repeat tract in the huntingtin gene. While the length of this CAG expansion is the major determinant of the age of onset (AO), other genetic factors have also been shown to play a modulatory role. Recent evidence suggests that neuroinflammations is a pivotal...

Nikolinka ANTCHEVA*, Francesca MORGERA*, Luisa CREATTI*, Lisa VACCARI†, Ulrike PAG‡, Sabrina PACOR*, Yechiel SHAI§, Hans-Georg SAHL‡ and Alessandro TOSSI*1 *Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, Giorgieri Street 1, 34127 Trieste, Italy, †ELETTRA Synchrotron Light Laboratory, Area Science Park, 34012 Basovizza, Trieste, Italy, ‡Institute for Medical Microbiology, Immunology and Par...

BACKGROUND A key issue in the treatment of periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) is the correct diagnosis. The main problem is lack of diagnostic tools able to diagnose a PJI with high accuracy. Alpha-defensin has been proposed as a possible solution, but in the current literature, there is a lack of independent validation. QUESTIONS/PURPOSES We performed a prospective study to determine (1) w...

Helicobacter pylori exhibits tropism for the human stomach causing a spectrum of complications ranging from gastritis to gastric cancer in susceptible individuals. The mechanism(s) that allow the bacteria to persist and cause disease are unfolding, p-defensins are a family of endogenous, epithelial anti-microbial peptides that engage in host defense most prominently at mucosal surfaces. We and ...

In this article, we introduce and apply our de novo protein design framework, which observes true backbone flexibility, to the redesign of human beta-defensin-2, a 41-residue cationic antimicrobial peptide of the innate immune system. The flexible design templates are generated using molecular dynamics simulations with both Generalized Born implicit solvation and explicit water molecules. These...

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have recently become widely publicized because they the potential to function in alternative therapies as “natural” antibiotics, with their main advantage being a broad spectrum of activity. The for antimicrobial treat diabetes mellitus (DM) has been reported. In type I (T1D), cathelicidin-related peptide (CRAMP), cathelicidin (CAMP) and mouse-β- defensin 14 (mBD14...

Fungi are an emerging source of peptide antibiotics. With the availability of a large number of model fungal genome sequences, we can expect that more and more fungal defensin-like peptides (fDLPs) will be discovered by sequence similarity search. Here, we report a total of 69 new fDLPs encoded by 63 genes, in which a group of fDLPs derived from dermatophytes are defined as a new family (fDEF8)...