Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) constitute promising alternatives to classical antibiotics for the treatment of drug-resistant infections, which are a rapidly emerging global health challenge. However, our understanding of the structure-function relationships of AMPs is limited, and we are just beginning to rationally engineer peptides in order to develop them as therapeutics. Here, we leverage a physicochemical-guided peptide design strategy to identify specific functional hotspots in the wasp-derived AMP polybia-CP and turn this toxic peptide into a viable antimicrobial. Helical fraction, hydrophobicity, and hydrophobic moment are identified as key structural and physicochemical determinants of antimicrobial activity, utilized in combination with rational engineering to generate synthetic AMPs with therapeutic activity in a mouse model. We demonstrate that, by tuning these physicochemical parameters, it is possible to design nontoxic synthetic peptides with enhanced sub-micromolar antimicrobial potency in vitro and anti-infective activity in vivo. We present a physicochemical-guided rational design strategy to generate peptide antibiotics.

Computer-Aided Design of Antimicrobial Peptides http://crdd.osdd.net/raghava/antibp2/ ClassAMP Uses RF and SVM to predict the propensity of a protein sequence to have antibacterial, antifungal, or antiviral activity http://www.bicnirrh.res.in/classamp/ AMPA Web tool for assessing the antimicrobial domains of proteins, with a focus on the design on new antimicrobial drugs http://tcoffee.crg.cat/apps/ampa/do DBAASP Provides users with information on detailed structure (chemical, 3D) and activity for those peptides, for which antimicrobial activity against particular target species have been evaluated experimentally https://dbaasp.org/home Joker An algorithm to design antimicrobial peptides using their language https://github.com/williamfp7/Joker

The advent of multidrug resistance among pathogenic bacteria has attracted great attention worldwide. As a response to this growing challenge, diverse studies have focused on the development of novel anti-infective therapies, including antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). The biological properties of this class of antimicrobials have been thoroughly investigated, and membranolytic activities are the most reported mechanisms by which AMPs kill bacteria. Nevertheless, an increasing number of works have pointed to a different direction, in which AMPs are seen to be capable of displaying non-lytic modes of action by internalizing bacterial cells. In this context, this review focused on the description of the in vitro and in vivo antibacterial and antibiofilm activities of non-lytic AMPs, including indolicidin, buforin II PR-39, bactenecins, apidaecin, and drosocin, also shedding light on how AMPs interact with and further translocate through bacterial membranes to act on intracellular targets, including DNA, RNA, cell wall and protein synthesis.