Phosphoaspartate (pAsp) is a labile posttranslational modification involved in bacterial signaling. To monitor pAsp we designed chemical proteomics method and revealed insights into the antimicrobial response triggered by human peptide hormone.

Antimicrobial host defense peptides are produced by all complex organisms as well as some microbes and have diverse and complex antimicrobial activities. Collectively these peptides demonstrate a broad range of antiviral and antibacterial activities and modes of action, and it is important to distinguish between direct microbicidal and indirect activities against such pathogens. The structural ...

Antimicrobial peptides are known to selectively disrupt (highly charged) microbial membranes by asymmetrical incorporation into the outer layers. We present a physical basis for membrane-charge selectivity of cationic antimicrobial peptides. In particular, we provide a clear picture of how peptide-charge Q influences the asymmetrical insertion--one salient feature is the existence of an optimal...

Antimicrobial peptides are short, positively charged, amphipathic peptides that possess a wide spectrum of antimicrobial activity and have an important role in the host's innate immunity. Lack of, or dysfunctions in, antimicrobial peptides have been correlated with infectious diseases, including periodontitis. Porphyromonas gingivalis, a gram-negative anaerobe and a major pathogen associated wi...

Active food packaging and antimicrobial surfaces are innovative solutions for increasing food-borne diseases and changes in food habits. This review describes the different methods for setting up active packaging, with specific focus on antimicrobial surfaces developed by peptide adsorption. The key elements in the study of peptide adsorption on surfaces are the peptide nature, the surface prop...

Human methionine sulfoxide reductase B3A (hMsrB3A) is an endoplasmic reticulum (ER) reductase that catalyzes the stereospecific reduction of methionine-R-sulfoxide to methionine in proteins. In this work, we identified an antimicrobial peptide from hMsrB3A protein. The N-terminal ER-targeting signal peptide (amino acids 1-31) conferred an antimicrobial effect in Escherichia coli cells. Sequence...

Background and Objective: Antimicrobial peptides have attracted significant attention in recent decades because of their properties, such as rapid bactericidal effects, having a wide spectrum of activity, and a rare development of drug resistance. The purpose of this study was to examine the antibacterial activity of a peptide derived from the lactoferrin isolated from camel milk against Staphy...

Structure-function relationships in antimicrobial peptides have been extensively investigated in order to obtain improved analogs. Most of these studies have targeted either alpha-helical peptides or beta-sheet peptides with multiple disulfide bridges. Tigerinins are short, nonhelical antimicrobial peptides with a single disulfide bridge. In this study, we have synthesized several analogs of ti...

Recently, we have shown that association with an antimicrobial peptide (AMP) can drastically alter the diffusion behavior of the constituent lipids in model membranes (Biochemistry 49, 4672-4678). In particular, we found that the diffusion time of a tracer fluorescent lipid through a confocal volume measured via fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) is distributed over a wide range of tim...