Hydrophobic diversification is the key to simultaneously increased antifungal activity and decreased cytotoxicity of two ab initio designed peptides.
Peptides
; 158: 170880, 2022 Dec.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-2042086
ABSTRACT
The fact that some antimicrobial peptides have been utilized clinically and as food preservatives stimulated the efforts in search of new candidates. In our previous studies, we succeeded in designing potent peptides against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-Cov-2), and Ebola viruses based on the database filtering technology. The designed peptides were proved highly potent. However, this ab initio method has not been utilized to design antifungal peptides. This study report two novel antifungal peptides with 21 and 15 amino acids designed by more effectively extracting the most probable parameters from â¼1200 antifungal peptides in the antimicrobial peptide database (APD). Subsequent hydrophobic diversification led to two peptide variants with enhanced activity against four fungal strains but reduced cytotoxicity to four mammalian cell lines. DFTAFP-1A (KWSGAAAKKLKSLLSGLGKLL) and DFTAFP-2A (KWSGLLLKLGAASKL) retained activity against Zygosaccharomyces bailii at pH 5.6 and 6.3 or after autoclave. The peptides could permeabilize fungal membranes and adopted helical conformations in membrane mimetic micelles. Collectively, this study demonstrated not only the successful design of two novel antifungal peptides based on the APD database but also optimization of desired peptide properties. This improved database approach may be utilized to design useful peptides to combat other drug-resistant pathogens as well.
Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Prognostic study
Topics:
Variants
Limits:
Animals
/
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
Peptides
Year:
2022
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
J.peptides.2022.170880
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