Department of Sciences, University of Basilicata, Via dell'Ateneo Lucano 10, 85100, Potenza, Italy.
Spinoff XFlies s.r.l, University of Basilicata, Via dell'Ateneo Lucano 10, 85100, Potenza, Italy.
Curr Pharm Des. 2022;28(35):2856-2866. doi: 10.2174/1381612828666220817163339.
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are small molecules belonging to innate immunity that act against bacteria, fungi, and viruses. With the spread of bacterial strains resistant to current antibiotics, the scientific community is deeply committed to the identification and study of new molecules with putative antimicrobial activity. In this context, AMPs represent a promising alternative to overcome this problem. To date, several databases have been built up to provide information on the AMPs identified so far and their physico-chemical properties. Moreover, several tools have been developed and are available online that allow to highlight sequences with putative antimicrobial activity and predict their biological activity. These tools can also predict the secondary and tertiary structures of putative AMPs, thus allowing molecular docking studies to evaluate potential interactions with proteins/ligands. In this paper, we focused our attention on online available AMPs databases and computational tools for biological activity and tertiary structure prediction, highlighting some papers in which the computational approach was successfully used. As the identification of peptides starts from the analysis of a large amount of data, we show that bioinformatics predictions are the best starting point for the identification of new sequences of interest that can be subsequently produced and tested.
抗菌肽 (AMPs) 是属于先天免疫系统的小分子，可对抗细菌、真菌和病毒。随着对抗生素具有耐药性的细菌菌株的传播，科学界正在深入致力于鉴定和研究具有潜在抗菌活性的新分子。在这种情况下，AMPs 代表了克服这一问题的有希望的替代方法。迄今为止，已经建立了几个数据库，以提供迄今为止鉴定的 AMPs 及其理化性质的信息。此外，还开发了一些可在线使用的工具，可用于突出具有潜在抗菌活性的序列并预测其生物活性。这些工具还可以预测潜在 AMPs 的二级和三级结构，从而允许进行分子对接研究以评估与蛋白质/配体的潜在相互作用。在本文中，我们专注于在线可用的 AMPs 数据库和用于生物活性和三级结构预测的计算工具，突出了一些成功使用计算方法的论文。由于肽的鉴定始于对大量数据的分析，因此我们表明生物信息学预测是鉴定新的感兴趣序列的最佳起点，这些序列可以随后进行生产和测试。
