Download De novo design and Synthesis of a Cationic Antimicrobial peptide

De novo design and Synthesis of a Cationic Antimicrobial
peptide
Vejleder: Evamaria Petersen, Peter Fojan
Antimicrobial Peptides are said to be the new antibiotics in the very near future, since more and more
antibiotics are being useless in the fight against infectious diseases. Especially multiresistant bacterial
strains turn out to be the novel threat in human health care. IN a few cases only one single antibiotic is left
to treat infections. Therefore these antibiotics have been reserved as a so called last reserve antibiotic.
In the meantime the search for novel antibiotics and antibiotics like substrances is going on. A very
promising class of molecules has been found in nature, which is beliefed to be one of the first immune
systems that has been developed on earth. This immune sdefense has been based upon short peptides, so
called antimicrobial peptides. These peptides have as a primary target the cell membrane and hence it is
more difficult for bacteria to develop resistances against this class of immune defense mechanism.
The antimicrobial peptides identified until today have been grouped into different classes, according to
their structure or their general composition. During this project you will design a novel cationic
antimicrobial peptide and then synthesise it on the peptide synthesizer and after purification of the peptide
you will investigate its antimicrobial activity against in the first round model strains, E.coli, B.subtilis,
M.Lysodeicticus.
After successful tests the peptide will be investigated in more detail and can also be studied on real
examples of infectious bacteria in cooperation with Aalborg Sygehus.