Current Protein and Peptide Science - Volume 14, Issue 7, 2013

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have been isolated from a wide variety of organisms that include microorganisms, plants, insects, frogs and mammals. As part of the innate immune system expressed in many tissues, AMPs are able to provide protection against invasion of foreign microorganisms and exhibit a broad spectrum of activity against bacteria, fungi and/or virus. Non-AMPs cell-penetrating peptides have b Read More

Numerous peptides are available on the market as therapeutic drugs for regulating tumor growth, microorganism proliferation, immune response and/or metabolic disorders. Peptides are produced either by chemical synthesis or heterologous expression. Independent of the method chosen, there are challenges to transferring its production from the bench (∼mg/L) to the industrial (∼g/L) scale. Thus, the main scale-up pitfalls Read More

Recombinant DNA technology has allowed the ectopic production of proteins and peptides of different organisms leading to biopharmaceutical production in large cultures of bacterial, yeasts and mammalian cells. Otherwise, the expression of recombinant proteins and peptides in plants is an attractive alternative presenting several advantages over the commonly used expression systems including reduced production costs Read More

Nowadays, peptide based disease prevention is an important topic in biomedical science, which may radically change the traditional use of biomaterials and improve the life quality. Self-assembled nanostructured peptides have been receiving extreme attention in the drug delivery field due their high biocompatibility levels, better loading capacity, extended circulation and localization in required target site. This article fo Read More

Biotechnology and nanotechnology are fields of science that can be applied together to solve a variety of biological issues. In the case of human health, biotechnology attempts to improve advances on the therapy against several diseases. Therapeutic peptides and proteins are promissory molecules for developing new medicines. Gene transfection and RNA interference have been considered important approaches for mod Read More

Antimicrobial peptides are distributed in all forms of life presenting activity against bacteria, fungi, viruses, parasites and cancer. In spite of the tremendous potential of these molecules, very few of them have been successfully developed into therapeutics. The major problems associated with this new class of antimicrobials are molecule stability, toxicity in host cells and production cost. A novel strategy to overcome these Read More

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are evolutionarily conserved components of the innate immune defense system of many living organisms varying from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, including humans. Due to their broad-spectrum activity and low level of induced resistance, these short aminoacid sequences represent a novel class of potential antimicrobial agents. Besides the development of anti-bacterial drugs, AMPs constitute id Read More

Growing evidence has shown that the proforms of several neurotrophins, e.g., nerve growth factor (NGF), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), neurotrophin3 (NT3) can be synthesized, secreted from neurons or glial cells and function actively in mammalian nervous system. By the intracellular and extracellular enzymatic cleavage processing, mature neurotrophins are generated and exert their functions in the deve Read More

The dystroglycan (DG) adhesion complex is formed by the peripheral α-DG and the transmembrane β-DG, both originating from the same precursor. α-DG plays a crucial role for tissue stability since it binds with high affinity a variety of proteins and proteoglycans in many different cell types. One common molecular feature of most of the α-DG ligands is the presence of laminin globular (LG) domains that are likely to int Read More

Receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) are cell surface receptors that transmit extracellular signals to the interior of the cell activating multiple signaling cascades: the binding of specific extracellular ligands activates RTKs which act as a scaffold at plasma membrane level for the recruitment and activation of several signaling molecules. A paradigm shift emerged when an alternative direct signaling pathway was discovered: RTKs Read More