Protein and Peptide Letters - Volume 23, Issue 8, 2016

It is becoming increasingly clear that plants ranging across the plant kingdom produce anionic host defence peptides (AHDPs) with potent activity against a wide variety of human cancers cells. In general, this activity involves membrane partitioning by AHDPs, which leads to membranolysis and / or internalization to attack intracellular targets such as DNA. Several models have been proposed to describe these events including: th Read More

It is high time now to discover novel drugs due to the increasing rate of drug resistance by the pathogen organisms and target cells as well as the dependence or tolerance of the body towards the drug. As it is obvious that significant numbers of the modern day pharmaceuticals are derived from natural products, it is equally astonishing to accept that venoms of various origins have therapeutic potentials. Wasp venoms are al Read More

Ribosome-inactivating proteins have been isolated from Trichosanthes kirilowii root tubers and seeds, including trichosanthin, karasurin and T 33 from root tubers and trichosanthrip, trichokirin, alpha-kirilowin, beta-kirilowin and trichoanguin from seeds. The aforementioned proteins show structural and functional similarities. Among them trichosanthin is the best known and most intensely studied. Trichosanthin manifests a Read More

The venoms of spiders and scorpions contain a variety of chemical compounds. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) from these organisms were first discovered in the 1990s. As of May 2015, there were 42 spider's and 63 scorpion's AMPs in the Antimicrobial Peptide Database (http://aps.unmc.edu/AP). These peptides have demonstrated broad or narrow-spectrum activities against bacteria, fungi, viruses, and p Read More

This review discusses the importance and properties of antimicrobial peptides from frogs and their synthetic analogues as potential therapeutic alternatives in fighting not only bacterial infections, but also protozoans involved with the major neglected diseases, which afflict human populations (e.g., Chagas disease, African sleeping sickness, Leishmaniasis and malaria). Here, we emphasize their multifunctional properties such a Read More

Due to the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms, the development of novel antimicrobial agents is a very important challenge. Dimerization of cationic antimicrobial peptides (cAMPs) is a potential strategy for enhancing antimicrobial activity. Here, we studied the effects of magainin 2 (MG2) dimerization on its structure and biological activity. Lysine and glutamic acid were used to synthesize the C- and N-ter Read More

The variety of proteins and peptides isolated from honey bee venom and wasp venom includes melittin, adiapin, apamine, bradykinin, cardiopep, mast cell degranulating peptide, mastoparan, phospholipase A2 and secapin. Some of the activities they demonstrate may find therapeutic applications.

Ubiquitin-like proteins play important roles in diverse biological processes. In Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Pup (prokaryotic ubiquitin-like protein), a functional homologue of eukaryotic ubiquitin, interacts with the proteasome ATPase subunit Mpa to recognize and unfold substrates, and then translocate them into the proteasome core for degradation. Previous studies revealed that, Pup, an intrinsically disordered protein (IDP), Read More

As an important pro-inflammatory cytokine, interleukin-1beta (IL-1β) participates in a variety of physiological and pathological responses. In order to obtain higher yielded recombinant human interleukin-1 beta (rhIL-1β), we cloned hIL-1β cDNA sequences based on the coding sequence of human mature IL-1. After recombinant pPICZA/hIL-1β was separated and sequenced, we transformed recombinant pPICZA/hIL-1β into P Read More