Discovery of novel antimicrobial peptides: A transcriptomic study of the sea anemone Cnidopus japonicus.
As essential conservative component of the innate immune systems of living organisms, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) could complement pharmaceuticals that increasingly fail to combat various pathogens exhibiting increased resistance to microbial antibiotics. Among the properties of AMPs that suggest their potential as therapeutic agents, diverse peptides in the venoms of various predators demonstrate antimicrobial activity and kill a wide range of microorganisms. To identify potent AMPs, the study reported here involved a transcriptomic profiling of the tentacle secretion of the sea anemone Cnidopus japonicus. An in silico search algorithm designed to discover toxin-like proteins containing AMPs was developed based on the evaluation of the properties and structural peculiarities of amino acid sequences. The algorithm revealed new proteins of the anemone containing antimicrobial candidate sequences, and 10 AMPs verified using high-throughput proteomics were synthesized. The antimicrobial activity of the candidate molecules was experimentally estimated against Gram-positive and -negative bacteria. Ultimately, three peptides exhibited antimicrobial activity against bacterial strains, which suggests that the method can be applied to reveal new AMPs in the venoms of other predators as well.
['Grafskaia|Ekaterina N|EN|', 'Polina|Nadezhda F|NF|', 'Babenko|Vladislav V|VV|', 'Kharlampieva|Daria D|DD|', 'Bobrovsky|Pavel A|PA|', 'Manuvera|Valentin A|VA|', 'Farafonova|Tatyana E|TE|', 'Anikanov|Nikolay A|NA|', 'Lazarev|Vassili N|VN|']
D000465:Algorithms D000818:Animals D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents D019295:Computational Biology D003198:Computer Simulation D055808:Drug Discovery D004353:Drug Evaluation, Preclinical D020869:Gene Expression Profiling D006090:Gram-Negative Bacteria D006094:Gram-Positive Bacteria D000069550:Machine Learning D008826:Microbial Sensitivity Tests D010455:Peptides D017433:Protein Structure, Secondary D040901:Proteomics D012615:Sea Anemones
Antimicrobial peptides transcriptome sea anemone predictive algorithm toxin