Emergent conformational and aggregation properties of synergistic antimicrobial peptide combinations.

ABSTRACT: Synergy between antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) may be the key to their evolutionary success and could be exploited to develop more potent antibacterial agents. One of the factors thought to be essential for AMP potency is their conformational flexibility, but characterising the diverse conformational states of AMPs experimentally remains challenging. Here we introduce a method for characterising the conformational flexibility of AMPs and provide new insights into how the interplay between conformation and aggregation in synergistic AMP combinations yields emergent properties. We use unsupervised learning and molecular dynamics simulations to show that mixing two AMPs from the Winter Flounder family (pleurocidin (WF2) & WF1a) constrains their conformational space, reducing the number of dist

SUBMITTER: Serian M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11488577 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature