Discovery of Plant Antimicrobial Peptides
The accelerated growth of antibiotic resistance has deepened the need to discover novel antimicrobial agents. In the search for new strategies, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have attracted much attention with their great potential. AMPs have broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity against many bacteria and fungi. Plants are a promising source of AMPs and are important as the next generation of antibiotics against superbugs.
Ace Therapeutics offers plant AMPs discovery services against superbug infections. We help find novel AMPs distributed in the plant kingdom by providing information collected and provide future directions for further research on possible use in the treatment of drug-resistant bacterial infections in humans.
Activity of Plant AMPs against Superbugs
Plant AMPs are a group of small biologically active proteins produced in plants. Such AMPs have been isolated from different plants and plant organs. They exhibit potent bactericidal activity against two types of bacteria. Plant AMPs have emerged as important candidates for novel antibiotics for the treatment of various bacterial infections in humans.
Fig. 1 3D structures of plant AMPs. (Li, J, et al., 2021)
Plant AMPs can exhibit direct effects by perturbing bacterial membranes or inhibiting intracellular functions. In addition to this, it can also modulate immunity to clear infections. On the other hand, many bacterial species form biofilms and thus are more resistant to drugs, and AMPs exhibit excellent properties in terms of anti-biofilm activity. It is due to these functions that bacteria have limited potential to develop resistance to AMPs.
Our Development Services for AMPs from Plant
Our services are dedicated to investigating the various possibilities of obtaining novel AMPs from the plant kingdom, in order to help researchers interested in the anti-superbug activity of novel AMPs to discover, isolate, characterize, evaluate, and test them.
Preliminary screening of plant AMPs.
Plant species possess a huge biodiversity. In identifying plant material, we can select potentially suitable plant species based on morphological, physiological and molecular data such as proteins, genomes, transcriptomes, etc. from the database. AMPs are then isolated from different plant organs such as stems, roots, seeds, flowers and leaves.
Isolation and extraction of plant AMPs.
We extract and purify AMPs from potential plant-derived materials. we usually provide some efficient and convenient separation and purification techniques, including gel filtration, ion exchange and high-performance liquid chromatography, then sequence and search for similar AMPs and identify new AMPs in our database. For purified AMPs, we offer IEXC, SDS-PAGE, RP-HPLC, CDS analysis, amino acid analysis, MALDI-TOF MS/MS analysis and other techniques to characterize the common properties of plant AMPs.
Plant AMPs activity assay against target antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
We offer methods for screening AMPs to determine their bacterial susceptibility, including phenotypic testing methods such as paper diffusion tests or agar well diffusion tests, genotypic methods, high-throughput methods, etc. We strictly control these experimental methods and associated conditions to ensure that the results obtained are reproducible and can be accurately interpreted.
Our Advantages
- AMPs quality assurance
- Selective assurance
- Durability assurance
- Safety assurance
Based on our strengths, we help our customers identify and develop less virulent, more stable and less costly to produce plant AMPs against superbug infections.
Please contact us to help you tap into the vast potential of plant AMPs against superbugs.
References
- Li, J, et al. Plant antimicrobial peptides: structures, functions, and applications. Botanical Studies, 2021, 62, 5.
- Tang S S, et al. Antimicrobial peptides from different plant sources: Isolation, characterisation, and purification. Phytochemistry, 2018, 154: 94-105.