Discovery of Novel Thanatin-like Antimicrobial Peptides from Bean Bug .

Endogenous antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are evolutionarily ancient molecular factors of innate immunity that play a key role in host defense. The study of the diversity of animal defense peptides has important applications in the context of the growing global antimicrobial resistance. In this study using a transcriptome mining approach, we found three novel thanatin-like β-hairpin AMPs in the bean bug , named Rip-2, Rip-3, and Rip-4.

Rumicidins are a family of mammalian host-defense peptides plugging the 70S ribosome exit tunnel.

The antimicrobial resistance crisis along with challenges of antimicrobial discovery revealed the vital necessity to develop new antibiotics. Many of the animal proline-rich antimicrobial peptides (PrAMPs) inhibit the process of bacterial translation. Genome projects allowed to identify immune-related genes encoding animal host defense peptides.

Avirulence of a spontaneous Francisella tularensis subsp. mediasiatica prmA mutant.

Francisella tularensis, the causative agent of tularemia, is divided into three subspecies. Two of these, subspecies holarctica and tularensis, are highly pathogenic to humans and consequently relatively well studied. The third subspecies, mediasiatica, is rarely isolated and remains poorly studied.

Novel BRICHOS-Related Antimicrobial Peptides from the Marine Worm : Transcriptome Mining, Synthesis, Biological Activities, and Therapeutic Potential.

Marine polychaetes represent an extremely rich and underexplored source of novel families of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). The rapid development of next generation sequencing technologies and modern bioinformatics approaches allows us to apply them for characterization of AMP-derived genes and the identification of encoded immune-related peptides with the aid of genome and transcriptome mining. Here, we describe a universal bioinformatic approach based on the conserved BRICHOS domain as a search query for the identification of novel structurally unique AMP families in annelids.