Antimicrobial peptides: Coming to the end of antibiotic era, the most promising agents

Abstract

Recently, because of the rising in multidrug resistance from infectious agents, there is a prompted interest for the development of new antimicrobial agents and new therapeutic strategies to combat the infections caused by the resistant bacteria. Among them, the natural bactericidal compounds, such as antimicrobial cationic peptides (AMPs) seems very promising agents. AMPs are the important component of the innate immune response to the surrounding microorganisms. This substances which can be isolated from most of the living organisms, have various activity like broad spectrum antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, and antiprotozoal. However there are some resistance mechanisms that affects the AMPs, because of the rapid action and existing more than one mechanism of action, development of resistance to AMPs is quite rare. Due to their many advantages and characteristics, AMPs looks like a good candidate for being a new generation, active antimicrobial agent for antimicrobial chemotherapy against especially multi drug resistant bacteria and biofilms, either alone or in combination.

Antimicrobial peptides, novel solution for the treatment of precancerous disease acne - A review

“…There is another possible mechanism that explains the translocation of the membrane once there is peptide-pathogenic contact, the "carpet-type" model is used to describe the capacity of aggregation of the peptides on the membrane and generate tension, as a detergent promoting the formation of micelles [51,52]. Peptidemembrane electrostatic attraction covers the surface of the host at different sites as a carpet (Figure 2) [53].…”

Lateral membrane organization as target of an antimicrobial peptidomimetic compound

“…Natural antimicrobial peptides and their mimics are promising scaffolds for the development of new antibiotics. Antimicrobial peptides are an integral part of our immune system, and as such they have potent antimicrobial activity against a broad range of bacteria 3 – 5 . However, they have several drawbacks, such as high production costs, cytotoxicity to red blood cells, and development of bacterial resistance 6 , 7 .…”

Lateral membrane organization as target of an antimicrobial peptidomimetic compound

“…Natural antimicrobial peptides and their mimics are promising scaffolds for the development of new antibiotics. Antimicrobial peptides are an integral part of our immune system, and as such they have potent antimicrobial activity against a broad range of bacteria [3][4][5] . However, they have several drawbacks, such as high production costs, cytotoxicity to red blood cells, and development of bacterial resistance 6,7 .…”

“…However, they have several drawbacks, such as high production costs, cytotoxicity to red blood cells, and development of bacterial resistance 6,7 . One way to overcome the antimicrobial resistance is to stabilize the antimicrobial peptides by using nonnative amino acids or modified peptide chains generating non-natural peptide mimicspeptidomimetics -which are stable in vivo, not harmful to human cells, and not suffering from resistance 5,[7][8][9][10] . Here we focus on a promising peptidomimetic AMC-109 (Figure 1a) 11 , a cationic artificial tripeptide that is relatively simple to synthesize, has a broad antimicrobial activity, and can be processed in large-scale industry 7 .…”