Rhodamine B-conjugated encrypted vipericidin nonapeptide is a potent toxin to zebrafish and associated with in vitro cytotoxicity.

Background: Animal venoms contain a diverse array of proteins and enzymes that are toxic toward various physiological systems. However, there are also some practical medicinal uses for these toxins including use as anti-bacterial and anti-tumor agents.

Methods: In this study, we identified a nine-residue cryptic oligopeptide, KRFKKFFKK (EVP50) that is repeatedly encoded in tandem within vipericidin sequences.

Results: EVP50 displayed in vivo potent lethal toxicity to zebrafish larvae (LD50=6 μM) when the peptide's N-terminus was chemically conjugated to rhodamine B (RhoB). In vitro, RhoB-conjugated EVP50 (RhoB-EVP50) exhibited a concentration-dependent cytotoxic effect toward MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells. In MCF-7 cells, the RhoB-EVP50 nonapeptide accumulated inside the cells within minutes. In the cytoplasm, the RhoB-EVP50 induced extracellular calcium influx and intracellular calcium release. Membrane budding was also observed after incubation with micromolar concentrations of the fluorescent EVP50 conjugate.

Conclusions: The conjugate's interference with calcium homeostasis, its intracellular accumulation and its induced membrane dysfunction (budding and vacuolization) seem to act in concert to disrupt the cell circuitry. Contrastively, unconjugated EVP50 peptide did not display neither toxic nor cytotoxic activities in our in vivo and in vitro models.

General Significance: The synergic mechanism of toxicity was restricted to the structurally modified encrypted vipericidin nonapeptide.