Lu Yi, Ma Yufang, Wang Xu, Liang Jianguo, Zhang Chongxin, Zhang Keyun, Lin Guoqing, Lai Ren
College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210095, China.
Mol Immunol. 2008 Feb;45(3):678-81. doi: 10.1016/j.molimm.2007.07.004. Epub 2007 Aug 20.
The crab-eating frog, Rana cancrivora, is one of only a handful of amphibians worldwide that tolerates saline waters. It typically inhabits brackish water of mangrove forests of Southeast Asia. A large amount of antimicrobial peptides belonging to different families have been identified from skins of amphibians inhabiting freshwater. No antimicrobial peptide from sea amphibians has been reported. In this paper, we firstly reported the antimicrobial peptide and its cDNA cloning from skin secretions of the crab-eating frog R. cancrivora. The antimicrobial peptide was named cancrin with an amino acid sequence of GSAQPYKQLHKVVNWDPYG. By BLAST search, cancrin had no significant similarity to any known peptides. The cDNA encoding cancrin was cloned from the cDNA library of the skin of R. cancrivora. The cancrin precursor is composed of 68 amino acid residues including a signal peptide, acidic spacer peptide, which are similar to other antimicrobial peptide precursors from Ranid amphibians and mature cancrin. The overall structure is similar to other amphibian antimicrobial peptide precursors although mature cancrin is different from known peptides. The current results reported a new family of amphibian antimicrobial peptide and the first antimicrobial peptide from sea amphibian.
食蟹蛙(Rana cancrivora)是世界上仅有的少数能耐受咸水的两栖动物之一。它通常栖息在东南亚红树林的半咸水中。从栖息于淡水的两栖动物皮肤中已鉴定出大量属于不同家族的抗菌肽。但尚未有来自海洋两栖动物的抗菌肽的报道。在本文中,我们首次报道了从食蟹蛙皮肤分泌物中分离出的抗菌肽及其cDNA克隆。该抗菌肽被命名为cancrin,其氨基酸序列为GSAQPYKQLHKVVNWDPYG。通过BLAST搜索,cancrin与任何已知肽均无显著相似性。编码cancrin的cDNA是从食蟹蛙皮肤的cDNA文库中克隆得到的。cancrin前体由68个氨基酸残基组成,包括一个信号肽、酸性间隔肽,这与蛙科两栖动物的其他抗菌肽前体以及成熟的cancrin相似。尽管成熟的cancrin与已知肽不同,但其整体结构与其他两栖动物抗菌肽前体相似。目前的研究结果报道了一个新的两栖动物抗菌肽家族以及首个来自海洋两栖动物的抗菌肽。