For one thing, what was the Augustan world of polite letters to make of the warrior culture of the Homeric epics? As Williams deftly shows, eighteenth-century values prized "manliness", setting off the "manly" against the effeminate, the childish, and the brutal. Yet the literary mores of the Spectator era also felt equivocal about the parade of martial virtues, seeing macho bellicosity as an o...

Maculatin 1.1 (Mac1) is an antimicrobial peptide from the skin of Australian tree frogs and is known to possess selectivity toward Gram-positive bacteria. Although Mac1 has membrane disrupting activity, it is not known how Mac1 selectively targets Gram-positive over Gram-negative bacteria. The interaction of Mac1 with Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and human red blood cells (hRBC) and...

The structural basis for the gram selectivity of two disulfide-bonded β-hairpin antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) is investigated using solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. The hexa-arginine PG-1 exhibits potent activities against both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, while a mutant of PG-1 with only three cationic residues maintains gram-positive activity but is 30-f...