The purpose of this paper is to introduce and highlight a few classes of traditional antimicrobial peptides with a focus on structure-activity relationship studies. After first dissecting the important physiochemical properties that influence the antimicrobial and toxic properties of antimicrobial peptides, the contributions of individual amino acids with respect to the peptides antibacterial p...

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) play an important role in innate immunity against pathogenic infections. AMPs exterminate bacteria by disrupting cell membranes or inhibiting intracellular molecules. NK-2, first identified pigs and derived from NK-lysin, has antimicrobial effects parasites. In this study, chimeric (cpNK) of chicken pig NK-2 cpNK-derived (cpNK-a1 cpNK-a2) were synthesized, their va...

Antimicrobial peptides are components of the innate immune systems of a wide variety of eukaryotic organisms and are being developed as antibiotics in the fight against bacterial and fungal infections. We explored the potential activities of antimicrobial peptides against the African trypanosome Trypanosoma brucei, a vector-borne protozoan parasite that is responsible for significant morbidity ...

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major worldwide health problem in part due to the lack of development of new treatments and the emergence of new strains such as multidrug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant strains that are threatening and impairing the control of this disease. In this study, the efficacy of natural and synthetic cationic antimicrobial (host defence) peptides that have been s...

BACKGROUND/AIMS The antimicrobial activity of the tear film exceeds the activity of its known constituents. The authors postulate that this excess activity is the result of antimicrobial peptides called defensins, and they aimed to look for defensins in the human eye. METHODS Evidence of defensin production was sought by reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Intron spannin...

Host-defense peptides, also called antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), whose protective action has been used by animals for millions of years, fulfill many requirements of the pharmaceutical industry, such as: (1) broad spectrum of activity; (2) unlike classic antibiotics, they induce very little resistance; (3) they act synergically with conventional antibiotics; (4) they neutralize endotoxins and ...

Essential understanding: Elucidation of structural requirements and interactions of antimicrobial peptides with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) are essential to understand the mechanism of action of antimicrobial peptides. The highly active antimicrobial peptide MSI-594 (see figure for electrostatic potential surface) acquires a novel helical hairpin structure in complex with LPS. The structure and in...

BACKGROUND A promising strategy to prevent infections around orthopaedic titanium implants is to use naturally occurring cationic antimicrobial peptides (CAMPs) such as the human β-defensin-2 as antibacterial coatings. Human antimicrobial peptides represent a part of the innate immune system and have a broad antimicrobial spectrum against bacteria, fungi, and viruses. METHODS In the present s...

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...

Hemoglobin, which widely exists in all vertebrates and in some invertebrates, is possibly a precursor of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). However, AMPs in the hemoglobin of invertebrates have been rarely investigated. This study is the first to report the full-length cDNA, prokaryotic expression, and antimicrobial activity of UuHb-F-I from Urechis unicinctus. The full-length cDNA sequence of UuHb...