Department of Environmental Engineering, College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China; Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory for Water Pollution Control and Environmental Safety, Hangzhou, China.
Department of Environmental Engineering, College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China; Innovation Center of Yangtze River Delta, Zhejiang University, China.
Environ Int. 2024 Apr;186:108574. doi: 10.1016/j.envint.2024.108574. Epub 2024 Mar 11.
The emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria poses a huge threat to the treatment of infections. Antimicrobial peptides are a class of short peptides that widely exist in organisms and are considered as potential substitutes for traditional antibiotics. Here, we use metagenomics combined with machine learning to find antimicrobial peptides from environmental metagenomes and successfully obtained 16,044,909 predicted AMPs. We compared the abundance of potential antimicrobial peptides in natural environments and engineered environments, and found that engineered environments also have great potential. Further, we chose sludge as a typical engineered environmental sample, and tried to mine antimicrobial peptides from it. Through metaproteome analysis and correlation analysis, we mined 27 candidate AMPs from sludge. We successfully synthesized 25 peptides by chemical synthesis, and experimentally verified that 21 peptides had antibacterial activity against the 4 strains tested. Our work highlights the potential for mining new antimicrobial peptides from engineered environments and demonstrates the effectiveness of mining antimicrobial peptides from sludge.
抗生素耐药菌的出现对感染的治疗构成了巨大威胁。抗菌肽是一类广泛存在于生物体内的短肽，被认为是传统抗生素的潜在替代品。在这里，我们使用宏基因组学结合机器学习从环境宏基因组中寻找抗菌肽，并成功获得了 16044909 个预测的 AMPs。我们比较了天然环境和工程环境中潜在抗菌肽的丰度，发现工程环境也具有很大的潜力。此外，我们选择污泥作为典型的工程环境样本，并尝试从中挖掘抗菌肽。通过宏蛋白质组学分析和相关性分析，我们从污泥中挖掘出 27 种候选 AMPs。我们通过化学合成成功合成了 25 个肽，并通过实验验证了 21 个肽对测试的 4 株菌具有抗菌活性。我们的工作强调了从工程环境中挖掘新的抗菌肽的潜力，并证明了从污泥中挖掘抗菌肽的有效性。
