Does Cholesterol Play a Role in the Bacterial Selectivity of Antimicrobial Peptides?

promising Antibiotic compounds The development of novel methods to overcome the inevitable resistance that develops with common antibiotics is an important area of current research. Recent studies have shown that antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have the potential to become excellent antibiotic compounds toward a broad-spectrum of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria with less potential for bacterial resistance than conventional antibiotics (Shai, 2004). Because these compounds are highly selective toward bacteria and bacteria have difficulty in developing resistance to their effects, a large number of studies have focused on designing potent AMPs for potential pharmaceutical applications (Maloy Biopolymers; Marsh et al., 2009). One of the designed peptides, MSI78 (also known as pexiganan), rose successfully to phase II clinical trials for treating infection in the case of diabetic foot ulcer (Gottler and Ramamoorthy, 2009).