Current Protein and Peptide Science - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2010

The central idea of this issue is to describe and discuss the potentialities of antimicrobial molecules isolated from native plant species of Brazil known to be employed by Amerindian populations as powerful antimicrobial drugs used in the traditional popular medicine, and from plants with great commercial and social interest such as sugarcane and legumes, respectively used for sugar as well as biofuels production and bas Read More

Mechanisms related to biotic interactions, such as pathogen attack, herbivory and symbiosis are important challenges to higher plants and have been widely studied especially for breeding purposes. The present review focuses on a special category of defense molecules, the plant antimicrobial peptides, providing an overview of their main molecular features and structures.

Despite of the high biological diversity and traditional use of medicinal plants in Brazil, no comprehensive ethnobotanic review of plants with potential antimicrobial effects is available. In the present work own field information is aggregated with a literature review, identifying 433 Brazilian plant species potentially useful for identification of antimicrobial peptides. They included mainly woody species, distributed on 100 plant Read More

The extensive amount of nucleotide sequences from diverse plant species in Data Banks enables the use of computational approaches to discovery still unidentified genes and to infer about their function, structure and role in some biological processes. Of special interest are the antimicrobial peptides (AMP), whose functionalities have a very important role in defense against microbial infection in multicellular eukaryotes, being Read More

As eukaryotes, plants include in innate defense antimicrobial peptides (AMP), usually small cysteine or glycine- rich peptides effective against a wide range of pathogens. The main classes of AMPs are represented by α/β- defensins, lipid-transfer proteins, thionins, cyclotides, snakins and hevein-like, according to amino acid sequence homology. In spite of increasing number of described AMPs from plants, last decade advances in Read More

Antimicrobial peptides exert an important role in plant defence and their structure/activity relationship against pathogens is widely described. Although the most striking feature of these antimicrobial peptides is their molecular diversity, they share some common features, such as a relatively low molecular weight, and the presence of a variable number of cysteines residues that contribute to stabilize conserved scaff Read More

Defensin, thionin and lipid transfer protein (LTP) gene families, which antimicrobial activity has an attractive use in protein engineering and transgenic production of agronomically important plants, have been here functionally reviewed. Also, a transcriptional overview of plant SuperSAGE libraries and analysis of 26 bp tags possibly annotated for those families are presented. Tags differentially expressed (p < 0.05) or consti Read More

To defend themselves from attack by pathogens, plants can rely only on their innate defense systems. Defensins are antimicrobial peptides that contribute to plant immunity by displaying a direct cidal activity against various pathogens, some of which are responsible for plant diseases. These determine a significant decrease in the quality and safety of agricultural products, especially among food crops, and cause significant ec Read More

All living organisms, ranging from microorganisms to plants and mammals, have evolved mechanisms to actively defend themselves against pathogen attack. A wide range of biological activities have been attributed to plant antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) including growth inhibitory effects on a broad range of fungi, Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, viruses, neoplastic cells and parasitic protozoa. Classes of AMPs, t Read More

EST (Expressed Sequence Tags) databases are increasing in number and size, especially regarding cultivated plants. Sugarcane is one of the most important tropical and subtropical crops, presenting a complex polyploid genome of hybrid origin, bearing a challenge for the understanding of genetic processes in higher plants. In the present work a general search was carried out on the largest Sugarcane EST Database (SUCE Read More