Mono-substitution effects on antimicrobial activity of stapled heptapeptides.

We previously reported a de novo design of antimicrobial heptapeptide helices using Verdine's all-hydrocarbon peptide stapling system. One of the important structure-activity relationships we found from these previous studies was that extending of the hydrophobic face by replacing of alanine with leucine in positon 5 increases antimicrobial activity. In this study, to further improve the activity profile of this peptide series, we investigated the substitution effects of position 5 on conformational and proteolytic stability as well as antimicrobial and hemolytic activity.