A linguistic model for the rational design of antimicrobial peptides.
Publication/Presentation Date
10-19-2006
Abstract
Antimicrobial peptides (AmPs) are small proteins that are used by the innate immune system to combat bacterial infection in multicellular eukaryotes. There is mounting evidence that these peptides are less susceptible to bacterial resistance than traditional antibiotics and could form the basis for a new class of therapeutic agents. Here we report the rational design of new AmPs that show limited homology to naturally occurring proteins but have strong bacteriostatic activity against several species of bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus anthracis. These peptides were designed using a linguistic model of natural AmPs: we treated the amino-acid sequences of natural AmPs as a formal language and built a set of regular grammars to describe this language. We used this set of grammars to create new, unnatural AmP sequences. Our peptides conform to the formal syntax of natural antimicrobial peptides but populate a previously unexplored region of protein sequence space.
Volume
443
Issue
7113
First Page
867
Last Page
869
ISSN
1476-4687
Published In/Presented At
Loose, C., Jensen, K., Rigoutsos, I., & Stephanopoulos, G. (2006). A linguistic model for the rational design of antimicrobial peptides. Nature, 443(7113), 867–869. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05233
Disciplines
Business Administration, Management, and Operations | Health and Medical Administration | Management Sciences and Quantitative Methods
PubMedID
17051220
Department(s)
Administration and Leadership
Document Type
Article