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...

Host protection from invading pathogens involves cellular and humoral effectors and results from the concerted action of both non-adaptive (innate) and adaptive (acquired) immunity. The latter is based on specific immunological recognition mediated by clonally distributed receptors, is a recent acquisition of the immune system, and is present only in vertebrates. The former evolved well before ...

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have been proposed as new class of antimicrobial drugs, following the increasing prevalence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Synthetic AMPs are functional analogues of highly evolutionarily conserved immune effectors in animals and plants, produced in response to microbial infection. Therefore, the proposed therapeutic use of AMPs bears the risk of 'arming the...

The extensive use and misuse of antibiotics in medicine result in the emergence of multidrug-resistant bacteria, creating an urgent need for the development of new chemotherapeutic agents. Nowadays, antimicrobial peptides are widely recognized as a class of promising candidates with activity against multidrug-resistant bacteria. NK-18 is a truncated peptide derived from NK-Lysin, an effector of...

We purified and characterized an unusual antimicrobial peptide, prophenin-1 (PF-1), from porcine leukocytes. The peptide had a mass of 8,683 and contained 79 residues, including 42 (53.2%) prolines and 15 (19.0%) phenylalanines. Its N-terminal 60 residues consisted of three perfect and three nearly perfect repeats of a decamer, FPPPNFPGPR. Prophenin-1 was encoded on a cathelin-containing precur...

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have been studied for three decades, and yet a molecular understanding of their mechanism of action is still lacking. Here we summarize current knowledge for both synthetic vesicle experiments and microbe experiments, with a focus on comparisons between the two. Microbial experiments are done at peptide to lipid ratios that are at least 4 orders of magnitude higher...

BACKGROUND hGlyrichin is a novel human antimicrobial peptide rich in glycine. The previous study of known human antimicrobial peptides indicated that in an eligible range, the greater corresponding antibacterial activity was consisted with the shorter peptide sequence. FINDINGS Two peptides named pCM19 and pCM12 were synthesized and the antibacterial activity assay results showed that these p...

Observations of real-time changes in living cells have contributed much to the field of cellular biology. The ability to image whole, living cells with nanometre resolution on a timescale that is relevant to dynamic cellular processes has so far been elusive. Here, we investigate the kinetics of individual bacterial cell death using a novel high-speed atomic force microscope optimized for imagi...

Here we show that keratinocytes in psoriatic lesional skin express increased Toll-like receptor (TLR) 9 that similarly localizes with elevated expression of the cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide LL-37. In culture, normal human keratinocytes exposed to LL-37 increased TLR9 expression. Furthermore, when keratinocytes were exposed to LL-37 and subsequently treated with TLR9 ligands, such as CpG o...