Antimicrobial peptides with stability toward tryptic degradation.

The inherent instability of peptides toward metabolic degradation is an obstacle on the way toward bringing potential peptide drugs onto the market. Truncation can be one way to increase the proteolytic stability of peptides, and in the present study the susceptibility against trypsin, which is one of the major proteolytic enzymes in the gastrointestinal tract, was investigated for several short and diverse libraries of promising cationic antimicrobial tripeptides. Quite surprisingly, trypsin was able to cleave very small cationic antimicrobial peptides at a substantial rate. Isothermal titration calorimetry studies revealed stoichiometric interactions between selected peptides and trypsin, with dissociation constants ranging from 1 to 20 microM. Introduction of hydrophobic C-terminal amide modifications and likewise bulky synthetic side chains on the central amino acid offered an effective way to increased half-life in our assays. Analysis of the degradation products revealed that the location of cleavage changed when different end-capping strategies were employed to increase the stability and the antimicrobial potency. This suggests that trypsin prefers a bulky hydrophobic element in S1' in addition to a positively charged side chain in S1 and that this binding dictates the mode of cleavage for these substrates. Molecular modeling studies supported this hypothesis, and it is shown that small alterations of the tripeptide result in two very different modes of trypsin binding and degradation. The data presented allows for the design of stable cationic antibacterial peptides and/or peptidomimetics based on several novel design principles.