With the steady rise in the number of antibiotic-resistant Gram-positive pathogens, it has become increasingly important to find new antibacterial agents which are highly active and have novel and diversified mechanisms of action. Two classes will be discussed here: the cationic antimicrobial peptides, which are amphiphilic in nature, targeting membranes and increasing their permeability; and l...

The increasing number of multidrug-resistant microbes now emerging necessitates the identification of novel antimicrobial agents. Plants produce a great variety of antimicrobial peptides including hundreds of small, nodule-specific cysteine-rich NCR peptides that, in the legume Medicago truncatula, govern the differentiation of endosymbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria and, in vitro, can display p...

As antibiotic resistance increases worldwide, there is an increasing pressure to develop novel classes of antimicrobial compounds to fight infectious disease. Peptide therapeutics represent a novel class of therapeutic agents. Some, such as cationic antimicrobial peptides and peptidoglycan recognition proteins, have been identified from studies of innate immune effector mechanisms, while others...

Cationic antimicrobial peptides and their therapeutic potential have garnered growing interest because of the proliferation of bacterial resistance. However, the discovery of new antimicrobial peptides from animals has proven challenging due to the limitations associated with conventional biochemical purification and difficulties in predicting active peptides from genomic sequences, if known. A...

Members of the cationic host defense (antimicrobial) peptide family are widely distributed in nature, existing in organisms from insects to plants to mammals and non-mammalian vertebrates. Although many demonstrate direct antimicrobial activity against bacteria, fungi, eukaryotic parasites and/or viruses, it has been established that cationic peptides have a key modulatory role in the innate im...

Fungal resistance to traditional drugs calls for new antimicrobial agents. In mammals, defensins and cathelicidins are two major families of antimicrobial peptides. Cathelicidins are cationic peptides with a conserved N-terminal cathelin-like domain and a variable C-terminal antimicrobial domain. Cathelicidins rapidly kill Candida and other yeast spp.1 Candida infection with C albicans is the f...

Antimicrobial peptides form part of the immune system as protection against the action of external pathogens. The differences that exist between mammalian and microbial cell membrane architectures are key aspects of the ability of these peptides to discriminate between pathogens and host cells. Given that the pathogen membrane is the non-specific target of these cationic peptides, different mol...