A pronounced membrane selectivity is demonstrated for short, hydrophilic, and highly charged antimicrobial peptides, end-tagged with aromatic amino acid stretches. The mechanisms underlying this were investigated by a method combination of fluorescence and CD spectroscopy, ellipsometry, and Langmuir balance measurements, as well as with functional assays on cell toxicity and antimicrobial effec...

Surface engineering of nanoparticles plays an essential role in their colloidal stability, biocompatibility and interaction with biosystems. In this study, a novel multidentate zwitterionic biopolymer derivative is obtained from conjugating dithiolane lipoic acid and zwitterionic acryloyloxyethyl phosphorylcholine to the chitosan oligosaccharide backbone. Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) modified by ...

Recently zwitterionic materials have been widely applied in the biomedical and bioengineering fields due to their excellent biocompatibility. Inspired by these, this study presents a graft-to strategy via covalent bond formation to fabricate safe and durable antibacterial textile surfaces. A novel zwitterionic sulfobetaine containing triazine reactive group was specifically designed and synthes...

The asymmetric unit of the title compound, C(19)H(22)N(2)O(2)·2H(2)O, comprises a zwitterionic form of the Schiff base compound and two water mol-ecules of crystallization. Inter-molecular N-H⋯O, C-H⋯O and O-H⋯N hydrogen bonds involving one of the water mol-ecules in the asymmetric unit generate seven- and eight-membered rings, with R(2) (1)(7) and R(2) (2)(8) ring motifs, respectively. The dih...

Tetracyclines (Tcs) are an important family of antibiotics that bind to the ribosome and several proteins. To model Tc interactions with protein and RNA, we have developed a molecular mechanics force field for 12 tetracyclines, consistent with the CHARMM force field. We considered each Tc variant in its zwitterionic tautomer, with and without a bound Mg(2+). We used structures from the Cambridg...

Zwitterionic polysaccharide (ZPS) components of the bacterial cell envelope have been shown to exert a major histocompatibility complex (MHC) II-dependent activation of CD4+ T cells, which in turn can modulate the outcome and progression of infections in animal models. We investigated the impact of zwitterionic cell wall teichoic acid (WTA) produced by Staphylococcus aureus on the development o...

Melittin (ME), a linear 26-residue non-cell-selective antimicrobial peptide, displays strong lytic activity against bacterial and human red blood cells. To design ME analogue with improved cell selectivity, we synthesized a melittin diastereomer (ME-D) with D-amino acid in the leucine zipper sequence (Leu-6, Lue-13 and Ile-20). Compared to ME, ME-D exhibited the same or 2-fold higher antibacter...

The lipid bilayer is a basic building block of biological membranes and can be pictured as a barrier separating two compartments filled with electrolyte solution. Artificial planar lipid bilayers are therefore commonly used as model systems to study the physical and electrical properties of the cell membranes in contact with electrolyte solution. Among them the glycerol-based polar phospholipid...

Material systems that can be used to flexibly and precisely define the chemical nature and molecular arrangement of a surface would be invaluable for the control of complex biointerfacial interactions. For example, progress in antifouling polymer biointerfaces that prevent non-specific protein adsorption and cell attachment, which can significantly improve the performance of an array of biomedi...

Efficient renal clearance has been observed from ultrasmall zwitterionic glutathionecoated gold nanoparticles (GS-AuNPs), which have broad preclinical applications in cancer diagnosis and kidney functional imaging. However, origin of such efficient renal clearance is still not clear. Herein, we conducted head-to-head comparison on physiological stability and renal clearance of two zwitterionic ...