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Repurposing a drug targeting peptide for targeting antimicrobial peptides against Staphylococcus

  • Ankan Choudhury
  • S. M. Ashiqul Islam
  • Meron R. Ghidey
  • Christopher Michel KearneyEmail author
Original Research Paper
First Online:

Abstract

Objectives

Targeted therapies seek to selectively eliminate a pathogen without disrupting the resident microbial community. However, with selectivity comes the potential for developing bacterial resistance. Thus, a diverse range of targeting peptides must be made available.

Results

Two commonly used antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), plectasin and eurocin, were genetically fused to the targeting peptide A12C, which selectively binds to Staphylococcus species. The targeting peptide did not decrease activity against the targeted Staphylococcus aureus and Staphylococcus epidermidis, but drastically decreased activity against the nontargeted species, Enterococcus faecalis, Bacillus subtilis, Lactococcus lactis and Lactobacillus rhamnosus. This effect was equally evident across two different AMPs, two different species of Staphylococcus, four different negative control bacteria, and against both biofilm and planktonic forms of the bacteria.

Conclusions

A12C, originally designed for targeted drug delivery, was repurposed to target antimicrobial peptides. This illustrates the wealth of ligands, both natural and synthetic, which can be adapted to develop a diverse array of targeting antimicrobial peptides.

Keywords

Antimicrobial peptides Phage peptide display Staphylococcus SUMO Targeted 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

Matthew Cranford from the Trakselis Laboratory at Baylor assisted with protein purification and the Baylor Mass Spectrometry Center provided support for our mass spectrometry analysis.

Supporting information

Supplementary File 1—Supplementary Figs. 1 to 11 and Table 1.

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the design of the project. AC, SI and MG built the genetic constructs and performed the protein purification and analysis. AC and MG did the microbial inhibition determinations. AC, SI, MG and CK wrote the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. CK supervised each stage of the experiment.

Funding

This work was funded by a University Research Committee (URC) grant provided by Baylor University [Grant No. KU-2015]. The design, implementation and data interpretation are solely the product of the authors.

Compliance with ethical standards

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Supplementary material

10529_2019_2779_MOESM1_ESM.docx (727 kb)
Supplementary file1 (DOCX 727 kb)

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Copyright information

© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Institute of Biomedical StudiesBaylor UniversityWacoUSA
  2. 2.Department of BiologyBaylor UniversityWacoUSA

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