Current Protein and Peptide Science - Volume 19, Issue 6, 2018

With the rapid increase of multiple drug-resistant bacteria, silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) with broad-spectrum antibacterial activities have been widely applied in the treatment of bacterial infection. Meanwhile, AgNPs also have anticancer activities against different cell lines. The toxic effects of AgNPs depend on concentration, size, shape, coated materials and surrounding environments. In order to better understand the antib Read More

Identifying the interactions between drugs and target proteins is a key step in drug discovery. This not only aids to understand the disease mechanism, but also helps to identify unexpected therapeutic activity or adverse side effects of drugs. Hence, drug-target interaction prediction becomes an essential tool in the field of drug repurposing. The availability of heterogeneous biological data on known drug-target intera Read More

Drug discovery and development is not only a time-consuming and labor-intensive process but also full of risk. Identifying targets of small molecules helps evaluate safety of drugs and find new therapeutic applications. The biotechnology measures a wide variety of properties related to drug and targets from different perspectives, thus generating a large body of data. This undoubtedly provides a solid foundation to expl Read More

Hemoglobin (Hb) is the prototypical example of a cooperative protein. Cooperativity of Hb is largely accounted for by the oxygen-linked allosteric interconversion between the T and R states/structures. Allostery is such a powerful explanation of Hb cooperativity that the possibility of cooperative events occurring within each allosteric conformation, in the absence of any quaternary structural change has usually been Read More

The vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is a homodimeric disulfide bound glycoprotein that promotes endothelial growth, accompanied by higher vascular permeability, and therefore represents an important factor for angiogenesis and vascularization. In addition, VEGF also has a neurotrophic and neuroprotective impact on glial and neuronal cells within the CNS and PNS. Recently, we have shown that VEGF increa Read More

Alpha synuclein (α-syn) belongs to a class of proteins which are commonly considered to play a detrimental role in neuronal survival. This assumption is based on the occurrence of a severe neuronal degeneration in patients carrying a multiplication of the α-syn gene (SNCA) and in a variety of experimental models, where overexpression of α-syn leads to cell death and neurological impairment. In these conditions, a hi Read More

Clusterin is a multifunctional glycoprotein whose role in cells has generated a great controversy in recent years. Since its discovery, numerous studies have linked clusterin expression deregulation with various physio-pathological processes such as cancer or Alzheimer's disease. Although the results of such investigations have sometimes been contradictory, mainly due to the dichotomous role of clusterin isoforms, it has b Read More

Arginine-rich cell penetrating peptides (CPPs) are very promising drug carriers to deliver membrane-impermeable pharmaceuticals, such as siRNA, bioactive peptides and proteins. CPPs directly penetrate into cells across cell membranes via a spontaneous energy-independent process, in which CPPs appear to interact with acidic lipids in the outer leaflet of the cell membrane. However, acidic lipids represent only 10 to 20% of th Read More