Plant Defense Peptides: Exploring the Structure-Function Correlation for Potential Applications in Drug Design and Therapeutics.

Defense peptides are part of plants' innate immune system and show widespread occurrence across the plant kingdom. Most of them belong to the category of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and act as strong chemical weapons against the biotic stresses that plants encounter. Plant AMP families exhibit remarkably conserved topology, being cysteine-rich with a conserved number of disulfide bridges stabilizing their three-dimensional structure, cationic in nature, and having hydrophobic surfaces.