Adherence of Haemophilus influenzae to bronchial epithelial cells is enhanced by neutrophil defensins, which are released from activated neutrophils during inflammation [Gorter et al. (1998) J. Infect. Dis. 178, 1067-1078]. In this study, we showed that the adherence of H. influenzae to various epithelial, fibroblast-like and endothelial cell types was significantly enhanced by defensins (20 mi...

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) seem to be promising alternatives to common antibiotics, which are facing increasing bacterial resistance. Among them are the cysteine-stabilized αβ defensins. These peptides are small, with a length ranging from 34 to 54 amino acid residues, cysteine-rich and extremely stable, normally composed of an α-helix and three β-strands stabilized by three or four disulfid...

Bacteria are one of the major factors shaping the evolutionary landscape of all eukaryotic organisms including humans. Bacterial epidemics, which have taken hundreds of millions of human lives in the observable history, are arguably some of the most vivid and cruel manifestations of natural selection. The history of co-evolution of eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms is ingrained in their orga...

The aphorism of Ecclesiastes that "there is no new thing under the sun" seems all too often to be irritatingly true; who has not had a "novel" idea that turned out to be "old hat"? The full quotation, read in context, seems to divine or explain the homologous and analogous forms found in the natural world, particularly now that structures are analysed at the molecular level. The defensins illus...

Antimicrobial peptides are major effectors of innate immunity of multicellular organisms including humans and play a critical role in host defense, and their importance is widely recognized. The epithelium of the intestine is the largest surface area exposed to the outer environment, including pathogens, toxins and foods. The Paneth cell lineage of intestinal epithelial cells produces and secre...

The three human beta-defensins, HBD1--3, are 33--47-residue, cationic antimicrobial proteins expressed by epithelial cells. All three proteins have broad spectrum antimicrobial activity, with HBD3 consistently being the most potent. Additionally, HBD3 has significant bactericidal activity against Gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus at physiological salt concentrations. We have compared the mult...

Volume 5 • Issue 3 • 2013 Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are small proteins (<100 amino acids) which include alpha-defensins, beta-defensins and the cathelicidin LL-37 in humans [1]. Alpha-defensins are expressed in neutrophils as part of their non-oxidative antimicrobial mechanismsand are also found in Paneth cells in the intestine [2,3]. They are synthesized as precursors that are proteolytica...

Mammalian α-defensins contribute to innate immunity by exerting antimicrobial activity against various pathogens. To perform structural and functional analysis of α-defensins, large amounts of α-defensins are essential. Although many expression systems for the production of recombinant α-defensins have been developed, attempts to obtain large amounts of α-defensins have been only moderately suc...

The small intestinal epithelium produces numerous antimicrobial peptides and proteins, including abundant enteric α-defensins. Although they most commonly function as potent antivirals in cell culture, enteric α-defensins have also been shown to enhance some viral infections in vitro. Efforts to determine the physiologic relevance of enhanced infection have been limited by the absence of a suit...

The distributions of β-defensin 1 and 2 in secretory host defense system throughout respiratory tract of healthy rats were immunohistochemically investigated. In the nasal epithelium, a large number of non-ciliated and non-microvillous cells (NCs) were immunopositive for both β-defensin 1 and 2, whereas a small number of goblet cells (GCs) were immunopositive only for β-defensin 1. Beta-defensi...